Heidi Crebo-Rediker is no stranger to taking bold and calculated risks. And one of her biggest pieces of career advice to women is to do the same, especially in the early stages of their career before starting a family.
“I seized big opportunities. I raised my hand at a very young age,” said Crebo-Rediker, an economist who is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and partner at International Capital Strategies, a boutique advisory firm.
In a conversation with Know Your Value founder Mika Brzezinski, Crebo-Rediker, recounted one of the biggest risks she took when she was right out of college.
It was after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and one of the first free economic zones in the Soviet Union was opening on the isolated Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East. In college, Crebo-Rediker had studied Russian, Soviet military strategy, literature, history and about centrally planned economies.
“Sakhalin Island is sort of north of Japan and south of Alaska. So, nobody else really wanted to go,” said Crebo-Rediker. “I raised my hand and I said, ‘Absolutely. This is one of the biggest opportunities at a very important time in history. And I’m in.’”
The experience paid off. Crebo-Rediker became one the first westerners to live and work in Sakhalin, which had previously been a closed military area. Her job was to work with the new Soviet regional government to introduce capitalism to their collapsing communist system.
“My life there from 1990 to 1992 was crazy, creative, and entrepreneurial,” she said, noting she learned to catch salmon with her bare hands, was frequently on the lookout for wild bears that occasionally wandered the streets, and lived through a coup in 1991. “There were no rules …You could do this at 23 – no one else had done it before.”
She went on to a career in investment banking in Europe and then served as chief of international finance and economics for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. She also served as the State Department’s first chief economist, appointed by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Crebo-Rediker, chatted with Brzezinski about her unconventional journey, how she learned to advocate for herself to get paid the equivalent of her male counterparts, navigating her career in her 50s and more.
Below is their conversation, which has been edited for brevity and clarity:
Brzezinski: The start of your career sounds incredible. Were there a lot of women around doing the same thing you were doing in your industry?
Crebo-Rediker: …Before I moved to investment banking, there were actually quite a few women in finance and in senior positions in the Soviet system, because it was considered women’s work, ironically.
Later in my career, I ended up going into investment banking, and I was quite surprised in the very early days after the collapse of the Soviet Union that a lot of the CFO positions in what ended up being companies, state or corporatized or privatized companies, were women. So, if you looked early days, the telecom company CFO was a woman. And women trusted other women in finance. So … it was actually advantageous to be a woman working at that period of time immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Brzezinski: You’ve told a story about almost getting traded for a camel in Uzbekistan and the managing director you worked for going too far with what he thought was a joke. There were many dynamics to this story. What happened?
Crebo-Rediker: I was very young. I had just finished the same sort of corporate finance program that one goes into at the very beginning of an investment banking career. I was based in London, and one of the first deals I worked on was a mining deal in the Kyzylkum Desert of Uzbekistan. And no, there were not a lot of women who [made such] deals. And we were staying at a typical, Soviet style, not great hotel.
I was with the managing director that I worked with and traveled with him there. We ate dinner at the restaurant, and some Uzbek guy walked up to the table and started asking if he could trade me for some carpets and a camel. And then the managing director I worked with thought it was hilarious and a great joke to play on me. So he started bartering …and then finally he said I was not for sale and it went on for a long time. His Russian was much better than mine. I thought it was very insulting. [He thought] I couldn’t take a joke, but in the middle of the night with the flimsy doors of the hotel, this guy came banging at my door all night. So, it was one of those sort of aha moments like, “wow this is actually putting me in some danger” in what was supposed to be a funny joke. This was I think in 1993.
Brzezinski Know Your Value, my platform began because I realized I was severely underpaid compared to my male counterparts. And then I wrote a book about how I fixed it. And you have a story of how a secretary tipped you off that you were being paid less than your male colleagues. Tell me that story.
Crebo-Rediker: I ended up going into investment banking and working as one of the only women in this particular bank in London.
I worked hard. People will know from my generation that women had a tough time in the banking business and particularly overseas, so you worked twice as hard. The senior men that were there were very supportive of me so I considered them as mentors.








