Podcast
Episode 
12

What Fascinates Terri Duhon of Morgan Stanley?

Pondering nature versus nurture, the brain as a muscle and the role of failure in success.

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What Fascinates Terri Duhon of Morgan Stanley?

Terri Duhon forged her own path from rural Louisiana to MIT to Wall Street to multiple boards, including Morgan Stanley and Women on Boards. She joined us via Zoom from her home London

Transcript

Bobby: Welcome to Loka’s Podcast, What Fascinates You?—conversations with entrepreneurs, engineers and visionaries who are driven to bring innovations to life. I'm Bobby Mukherjee. Today I'm excited to be joined by Terri Duhon via Zoom from her home in London, England. Terri’s on the board of Morgan Stanley International in London, and if her name sounds familiar, it might be because you've seen her on the TEDx stage or read her book.

Terri has played in so many different sandboxes that I know we won't get a chance to cover everything. So today I'm gonna try something new and share three topics that I promise I'll get to in our chat: What have you learned as an ambassador for women in finance? What role has failure played in your entrepreneurial journey, and how is AI and ML changing how companies like Morgan Stanley do business?

Alright, without further ado, let's dive in. I'd like to start off and have you introduce yourself please.

Terri: My name is Terri Duhon and I live in London, and I sit on a number of boards, the board of Rathbones, which is a wealth manager in the UK, the board of Morgan Stanley. I chair the board of Morgan Stanley, investment management. I chair some risk committees and I'm an associate fellow at Oxford University. So I have a portfolio of things that I get to do.

Bobby: It's a pleasure to have you on. I really appreciate you being here. I've been excited  to talk to you for some time and glad we could make the time to make this happen. Last time we talked, we touched on a number of really interesting topics and we briefly touched on your schooling years in the US before you went to university.

If we were to go back in time and meet the 10 year old Terri, what fascinated the 10 year old Terri?

Terri: I think that ultimately in my heart, I was always a little bit of an entrepreneur. I grew up in rural Louisiana, and one of the things I used to love to do was find old pieces of wood and nail them together and build a desk for myself and then old pieces of wood and build a chair for myself.

And then if I could find, like an old phone, you remember phones, the real ones? I used to love just literally putting that on the desk. I had just built. And finding paper and sitting there with a pencil and like pretending to punch the buttons, all the TV shows and the movies you saw, the person behind that desk was really powerful.

And I wanted to be that person. I think it developed into me being an entrepreneur. But when I think back to that 10 year old girl, in addition to running around outside and playing in the dirt, it was sitting behind this desk that I had cobbled together myself.

Bobby: That's interesting. As a kid growing up, as we all do, you have friends, family, television, books, movies–what image had you concocted in your head of what an entrepreneur leader looks like to you?

Terri: I don't even know if we knew that word when I was growing up. I think we used “business person,” but my mama was a dance teacher, so she had her own dance studio and when I think back today, it's only now that I realize how unbelievably brave she was to borrow the money to build a building and then set herself up in a town where she had just moved because she's, married to my daddy and she doesn't really know anybody.

She's an outsider and she's gonna set up a dance studio. And my daddy worked in the oil field, but he worked for himself. So in a way, both of my parents were entrepreneurs. It wasn't about working for a large company at all. So interestingly, when I first joined JP Morgan straight out of m i t, it was so foreign, this idea of wearing a suit every day, going into the office, working in this big organization as opposed to what I had seen my parents do, which was do their own thing, which, how brave were they to do that back in the day?

Bobby: Yeah, incredibly like you said, it was a very different time and a lot of the tools that we take for granted now just did not exist to help support what we now consider entrepreneurs to get going. So you had mentioned you went to a particular school that helps set you up to go to m i t, and so talk to me a little bit about how that journey happened.

Terri: Yeah. Louisiana is a state that has like a magnet school basically for their gifted and talented students. And in a rural high school in Louisiana, at the time, if you were a boy, you played sports, right? And if you were a girl, you were a cheerleader. So I was a cheerleader, which I loved, by the way.

Because I went to my mama's dancing school and I danced and I did gymnastics, and I was in the marching band too, and I played the flute. So Louisiana had this magnet school, and my counselor at my high school came up to me and said, look, would you be interested in this? I didn't think much of it. I put the pamphlet in my bag and my mama found it in my backpack.

And she said, Terri, this looks amazing. And I said, yeah, but it, I'd have to move away from home. And she said, Terri, this is amazing. If you could do this, you've got to try. And I didn't feel like I was being kicked out. I felt so unbelievably supported. So I had to take the SATs and all of that stuff.

But when you rock up to a school for gifted and talented, And you are a cheerleader. You don't exactly fit in. You know how cliques form in American high schools and you've got the smart kids are over here and the cheerleaders are over here, and not that they're mutually exclusive. And yet there I rocked up and I was like so excited and I was bouncy and boppy and that did not make me friends.

I eventually became friends with everybody, but they were like, you know what an airhead she is. How is she even here?

Bobby: Did that give you great preparation for the types of personalities and personas you would run into at m mit or was m i t its

Terri: own? Oh my goodness. MIT was a whole, oh my goodness.

MIT was amazing. What I learned is when intelligence is not really intelligence. They used to tell us that the s a t test was a measure of intelligence. The difference between my score when I applied, and then after a year later at this high school was unbelievable. And what I learned is that your brain's a muscle and you train it and you can do amazing things with it.

So anything's possible, and if we could give amazing education to everyone, we should, right? MIT, of course, was a reach school. It's a reach school for everybody. And in fact, today I think about 80% of the students that apply are academically, Completely capable of going. And you think, my goodness, how do you even choose between all of these amazing students?

So I think I was very lucky to get in, but MIT was a whole ‘nother world.

Bobby: When you applied and got into MIT  at that point, had you decided that you were more focused on eventually becoming this math major or were you still kinda undecided about whether you would plant yourself in the humanities or in the science?

Terri: Oh no. The high school I went to asked us to focus and I decided when I went to MIT, I was gonna become a mechanical engineer. I wanted to build race cars, right? Do something fun. But when I got there, and I started taking mechanical engineering, II thought, I'm not sure this is for me, really.

And I thought, when I look at the mechanical engineers, they seem to go off and do something like work on the fuel injector system or the anti-lock braking system or something. And I was like, I wanted to do something bigger than that. And so I decided to study math. Once again I called up my parents.

I said, I think, I'm gonna switch majors. And they said, oh my God, how are you going to get a job with a math degree? They didn't have any money to support me at all. I was on a full package at MIT I needed to get A J-O-B if I wanted to E-A-T, right? And they were very concerned.

And I said, look, I'm sure I can do this. And the funny thing is, I never even considered applying to someplace like Harvard or someplace with a more liberal arts background. I thought I was terrible at liberal arts. Just terrible because I that's how I felt about it. It was a bigger challenge for me.

I can't spell to save my life. I just thought I was horrible at it. So I chose MIT and it's funny because later I ended up writing a book and it was a good book actually. It's called How the Trading Floor Really Works. You're not gonna necessarily wanna read it on Friday night when you have nothing else to do.

It's not exactly 50 Shades of Gray, but actually it's pretty well-written. I was really proud and I thought, gosh, schools, they give you feedback. In a way that pushes you in one direction or the other. Everybody in my math and sciences said, Terri, you're amazing. And everybody in my liberal arts was like, oh, you need a little bit of work.

Again, we're all capable of so much more than we realize, it's why teachers have such an important role to play because they can point people in different directions with just one comment, one criticism, one thought, one supportive statement and then a child's off doing something amazing.

Bobby: Yeah. It has significant impact on the trajectory. Which makes me wonder, so you know, you had this great experience in this specialized high school, which provided a nice launching pad for you to successfully get into MIT. So you've been in these great institutions. I'm wondering, as you look back, has that helped you decide, in the nature versus nurture debate, which side of the debate do you come out on?

Terri: I'm definitely on the nurture side for sure. Yeah. I do a lot of educating. I spend a lot of time teaching and I, when I have a group of students who don't understand something, or I have some students who understood it or some students who didn't, what I say to them is, look, if you didn't get it, it's because I didn't explain it well enough, and I can explain it a different way.

And I can show it to you with a graph, or I can show it to you with numbers, or I can give you an example. Maybe you learn with stories, right? Everybody learns in a different way, and the challenge with having 30 kids in a room for many teachers is that you just don't have the option to teach to everyone's particular learning style.

I believe that if we could, in a very multisensory learning environment, anybody could learn anything and it kills me that math is considered this really hard subject. When  actually, it is the coolest subject in the world. Honestly, math is so awesome. My daughter just had a birthday party, a sleepover with 10 girls, and I said, okay, so who likes math?

Like I'm a mathematician. And they were like, oh, you're a mathematician. Oh, we hate math. Roger's really good at math. And they start listing  all these boys. And I was just, I wanted to cry and I was like, math is so awesome. And actually, and I lied a little bit, but I said, girls are naturally better at math than boys.

I just wanted them to think they could do it, and I just, it breaks my heart, I believe. Look, there's a lot of nurture that not only. It has an impact on how and what we learn, but has an impact on how and what we do and how we behave. And I can see that, there's this idea that women have to fall in a particular very narrow behavioral band.

And in the US New York, for example, many women are told to tone it down as they come across as too strong. Sharp elbows, aggressive, all of those words. And they need to tone it down because they're outside of the band, but they're at the top. And women in the UK are mostly told to dial it up. They're not confident enough, they're too quiet, they're not raising their hand enough, they're not putting themselves forward.

So they're under that little band of where we're allowed to behave. And when you're in the UK you have these debates where I say, look ladies, Put yourself out there, take some risk. The system exists the way it is. You need to make yourself heard. And many people will say to me, Ooh, don't tell me to change who I am.

And I'm like, actually, I'm pretty sure that you have been socialized to be the way you are. Because when I can't compare, contrast what I see in groups of women between, and again, this is anecdotal, I'm looking at groups of women in the US versus the uk and I'm seeing such different behaviors. I think we're socialized to behave in different ways and as a result we can change those behaviors easily. And not that we want to lose sight of who we are, but I think a lot of who we are is nurture.

Bobby: I would definitely agree and fascinating to hear about the contrast between what you experienced with women in New York versus women in the UK.

I'm just curious, given banking is so global, if you ever had any similar kind of anecdotes for women that you mentored or were helping moving their career forward in Asia, were there any differences if you compare those two?

Terri: Often what I see in my classes at Oxford, I'm at the business school, so I do see a lot of American women and I see a lot of Asian women.

And the contrast is probably, again, just observing very similar to that of women in the US versus the UK. Asian women are definitely quieter in my classes and and interestingly, they're so capable and they're so amazing and they have so much to contribute. And so my job is to try and pull them out and get them to engage and I look, part of it is possibly, it's how you've been socialized. Maybe it's that, people talk about the confidence issue. People talk about imposter syndrome but also just broadly, there's a lot of Asian educational institutions where you're not expected to speak up in the classroom, right? You're expected to listen and then, and take notes.

And so you know, when you're coming from that sort of environment, it impacts both men and women. In fact and in the classroom, I'm actually struggling not just to get the Asian women to speak, but I want the Asian men to speak as well and I have to get them comfortable that they can and that their opinion is important in the classroom, in my classroom.

Bobby: That makes a lot of sense. So one of the topics that you've covered in the past that really interests me is non-linear careers, and before we talk about that, it's always good to understand how this has impacted you. So with. Your career where, we're approaching the end of, say your m mit, your time at MIT, did you know you wanted to go into banking by your senior year?

Terri: Yes, I think by my senior year I knew, but I certainly didn't know when I first chose math. When my parents said, how are you gonna get a job? Very focused on how are you gonna get a job? And I didn't have an answer initially. I had this sort of dream. I was gonna do something sitting behind my little wooden desk that I had built myself.

I had this, I'm gonna do something amazing when I grow up, dream and, I didn't know what that was. I wanted to change the world. I wanted to have an impact. No different than young people today. They want purpose, they wanna do something incredible. And I didn't know what that was. And you know what?

Ultimately I settled on Wall Street, which at the time was just starting to look at the STEM subjects because that's when derivatives were taking off. And so there was a huge recruiting effort across the MIT campus. And I went along to some presentations and that energy from  these traders and these bankers–this was the ‘90s.

I know bankers and traders are like detested individuals today and everybody hates us. But in the ‘90s, in the early ‘90s it was so exciting and Wall Street sounded like so much fun. Things were moving very quickly and moving fast. And I thought, wow, that just sounds incredible.

And I looked at other things I could do. Like I looked at consulting and I saw people in cubicles and I thought, oh my goodness, I can't imagine sitting in a cubicle for 12 hours a day. And I thought, but I could sit on a trading floor where people seem to be running around and shouting and waving their hands at each other all the time.

That doesn't even look like a job. That looks like fun!

Bobby: The students that you teach, colleagues that you run into in Morgan Stanley, if they look at your career, it feels like this preordained escalator right to the top. But my understanding from digging a bit deeper to you is that it's far from that.

It's a case of exactly what you talk about, this nonlinear thing. One of the things that you talked to me about last time that really struck me was as you're teaching the next gen, as they get ready, as they're graduating from college, they fret about that first job. Like it's the most important thing in the world.

And if they get that one decision wrong, everything else will just like crumble. And it's about the worst. It's terrible advice and it's not really reality. And I was wondering if you could expand on that.

Terri: I guess there are a few things in what you said, but I do, I speak to a lot of university students about their career choices.

I give lectures on it. I talk about how to think about it. I talk about opportunities in finance, how to think about other opportunities, fintech and such, because I do a lot of lecturing on fintech. And the truth is that first decision you make is one of many that you get to make along the way. You can course correct at any point, but every decision.

Is not the most important, right? It's not the decision itself. It's one of many that come along and I spent 10 years on the trading floor, then I became an entrepreneur for 10 years, and now I'm doing the portfolio thing and there'll be another career and  another career if I'm lucky.

And my goal is just to do something fun and fun for me is just. Learning, right? Always adding to my skill sets and doing something different and challenging. And when you're a student, every job is gonna be a learning experience. Every job is gonna be a learning experience. Where are you gonna have fun and really thrive?

Because off the back of that first job, you get to pick a second and you get to pick a third, and you get to pick a fourth. And the more successful you are in your first job, no matter what it is, The more opportunities you get in the second choice and the more you get in the third, and it just maximizes the different options and the paths that you can follow.

What fun, right?

Bobby: Yeah, for sure. So if you go back to your early jobs and stints on your career journey, that was nonlinear, were they as fun as the fun you have now?

Terri: No, definitely not. No, not at all. My the truth is that going from being a student and What's that? There's a book even about this, Excellent Sheep. I think it's a Yale professor and is the observation is in these elite universities, you've got these amazing students who are ticking some boxes that they know they have to tick in order to get to a certain achievement level.

Most of us figure out how to be excellent students. You figure out what boxes you have to take to get the right grades to you figure out how to work and collaborate with your little pod that you're supposed to do a joint project on. You figure out how much time you have to spend on the Jo on the work in order to get the grade you need when you start working.

It's a total unknown. My first day on the trading floor, I remember. I could have been on the Starship Enterprise. I mean they, they could have been speaking Klingon for all I knew. It was another language, right? It was absolutely another language. And I remember sitting down and the guy says, okay, so Terri, your job, you're going to be trading the short end of the Canadian and the US dollar interest rate swap curve.

That's two years on under, you're gonna do long date FX swaps between US and Canadian. And the 13 different currencies. This is pre-Euro. And you're also going to do all the cross-currency basis swaps here in the us And then when Japan goes home, when Tokyo goes home, you're gonna run the JGB and the Yen swap book, and you're gonna do all the basis trades.

So that's some of the inflation trades. And then if you lose any money, you're fired. I couldn't even process the words as he said them. They were moving too fast across the screen. I like, I am trying to take notes. I don't even know how to spell most of what he is talking about.

And he said, do you have any questions? And I was like, well, just the most fundamental thing we do in the swap world in interest rates. He just looked at me and he just laughed and he said, you'll figure it out. And literally that was it. You'll figure it out. And I was so lost and I remember I.

Once even asking questions, trying to figure stuff out. I asked, I was asking questions and somebody was so irritated that I had asked too many questions that he threw a book at me. Now, of course, wow, you couldn't really do that today, right? It would be considered pretty bad, but he didn't throw it at my face, to be fair.

He just threw it in my direction and was, because he was focusing on the markets and he was probably losing money. So he was irritated, but it was Look, it was trying to figure out how to behave, how to be successful. I thought I knew how to be successful as a student. Sitting on the trading floor was hard for sure, but fun, eventually fun.

Bobby: That's something that I try my best when I'm working with, fresh college grads. It's sort of expectation setting about fun, the fun changes, and I think that people have. Sometimes unrealistic view of how much fun at what stages they might have, and there needs to be some level setting with that.

So that's, I think that's a great story to illustrate that point of the kind of fun I would say it's a lot more fun to look back on and talk about it. It's more fun now.

Terri: I'm sure that's true. I'm sure that's true for all of us. You know the rose colored glasses, right?

Bobby: Yeah. And there's a lot we could unpack there just because I know one of the things you care deeply about is helping the Terris of today get launched into their career at JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley or any of these banks.

And one of the great quotes I heard you say a while back was that you worry that the Wolf of Wall Street is gonna be the recruiting video. For these folks, which makes me think back to the time that when you started, you were starting, I don't know, probably six, seven years after Wall Street when Michael Douglas had come out.

And so tell me a little bit more about what you meant when you said you about your worries about Wolf of Wall Street.

Terri: I hadn't seen Wall Street with Michael Douglas, but I did read the book Liar’s Poker, and it was supposed to be a cautionary tale, right? But that's not what I, that's not what I read. I read high excitement.

And actually the treatment of women in the book is horrendous, is actually right. And yet I didn't see that at all. I didn't see that. I just saw very smart people, high energy environment, very intense, really exciting. The ability to help develop markets. And how interesting was that? And I didn't really, look, I didn't know the difference, but I didn't know what a stock or a bond was.

When I told my parents I was gonna go and work at JP Morgan, they thought I was gonna be a teller at a bank. And they said what are you gonna do? And I said I'm gonna, Trade, something called derivatives. And they were like what's that? And I said I actually have no idea, but I'm so excited.

I didn't know. What I took out of the book was excitement and energy. And what I took out of all of the presentations was excitement and energy. And I needed that. I needed that. But today, the world's moved on significantly. And what we all recognized is that the culture. Of an organization drives the conduct and drives the outcomes for our clients.

And so you want a good culture so that you can get the right outcomes for your clients. You want a good culture so that you can continue to innovate and do fun and interesting things, but you want good conduct and. They drive each other. And when you look at the Wolf of Wall Street, it actually doesn't necessarily convey high energy and excitement.

To me, it conveys something totally different. It conveys something really horrible. And my worry is that there's so much about Wall Street that is shown as greedy as. It's all about money. And of course that is what we do. We're in, we're in the world of money but that's the whole, that's the whole goal.

And if people are looking at Wolf of Wall Street and thinking, wow, that's fun, I'd love to do that, then we have a problem. Because we need people. We need people who want to do the right thing. At the end of the day, the industry has not covered itself in glory in terms of its behavior in the past, and there are always high profile.

Situations which are, which you think, my goodness, how did they get there? And we need to stop those from happening and we need the right culture to do that.

Bobby: I completely agree. You've been in investment banking, but you've also been a celebrated entrepreneur in your own right. Those of us that are in that business entrepreneurship know that failure is a huge part of that process. So what role did failure play in your success?

Terri: Failure was everything. Failure was simply everything. And when I tell my bio, when I tell my story personally, I think it's a bit misleading. If I only hit the highlights because it just doesn't make what I've done sound achievable, it makes it sound like, oh, I just skipped from Louisiana to m i t and then from m i t to Wall Street, JP Morgan, and then from Wall Street to the city of London, and then entrepreneur built businesses.

Became an associate fellow at Oxford, as everyone does of course. And, sit on the board boards from Morgan Stanley. And yes, life is great. And the truth is actually that every single one of those highs had an associated low, somewhere along the way where I had put myself on a path to achieve something.

But, I had to take some risk, I had to put myself out there. I had to have a low, ultimately to give me the. The oomph to get there. So when I talk to students today, I do tell them my little hop, skip, and jump on all these highs, but then I say, followed by those highs. Let me tell you the real story.

My first interview for a Wall Street job at m i t was so awful. So awful. I was kicked out within 15 minutes. In front of the line of students that were waiting for their interview. When I turned to the guy and I said, can I get your business card to send you a follow up? He said, oh, don't bother.

Seriously, in front of the whole line of am the story went around the university campus until it came back to me. Literally, people were like, oh, did you hear the story about this girl? And I was fired. At JP Morgan, I was hired back the same day, to be fair, but I was fired.

I was properly fired. My first business was I. Pretty good until the crisis when every one of my clients seemed to have gone bust. My second business was a total bust. I didn't invest enough in my first, and I missed a massive opportunity. I didn't take enough risk. When I started telling people I wanted to sit on boards, they laughed at me.

Laughed outright. Laughter like, Terri, what can you add? You're like a little girl. How can you add any value? And I was like, I'm pretty sure I can do this. Actually. In fact, I'm not even sure it's that complicated, I'm pretty sure I can do this. There was a point, the hardest thing I ever did was get onto boards.

Actually, the hardest thing I ever did, because it was my path, was so non-linear and non-traditional. The boardroom, the path to the boardroom is you work your way up the corporate, you eventually get to present to the board. You eventually get to maybe sit on a committee, maybe you chair a committee, maybe you sit on the board, and then eventually you've got board experience, and then another company says, Ooh, can you come and sit on my board too?

That's your traditional path. And I didn't follow that path. I I only spent 10 years in the corporate world and then I did my own thing. But hell, I thought, I understand the corporate world. I understand finance, I understand strategy because I was an entrepreneur. I've sat on some charity boards.

I got this right. What do I not, what box do I not tick here? And they said no, you have to be on a board to get on a board. And I was like, I'm sorry, what? You have to be on a board. And I was like, you do realize how stupid what you're saying is right. And so I had to push and push and my husband used to laugh at me.

My husband used to say, Terri, it's because I basically, I made an, I'm a big Excel spreadsheet fan, right? I literally made a list of everyone I knew that I could contact and pitch myself to sit on a board. And then every time I met with someone I asked for, Five other names of people, other people I should meet, and I, my husband said, Terri, you know that you are, it's like you're a professional coffee drinker at the moment.

All you do is have coffees with people. And he said, I've never seen anyone network as hard as you do. It's like a full-time job. He laughed at me and I said, yeah, but the traditional path to the boardroom isn't getting me what I need. I've gotta go the alternative route. There were tough conversations though, because there were a number of them that were like, eh, I don't see it.

Bobby: I like the way you said it. Failure was everything to your success. Which is magical. All right, so let's switch gears a little bit and talk about something near and dear to my heart, AI and ML, and what you are seeing in your industry in FinTech. It's really

Terri: interesting. I sit on a number of roundtables where the bank board members from around the world, and today we do it globally because we can all sit on Zoom together.

We just recently had a conversation around AI ml. The evolution of how we do things in the financial market space has gone from zero to a million over the past 10, 15 years. That's an incredible transition. 10, 15 years ago, if you had walked onto any equity trading floor, you'd have seen a hundred equity traders and one quant.

Today, you'll see a hundred quants and maybe one equity trader. The transformation of moving from the human decision making to the algo decision making is massive. So in terms of how we do our business today, in certain markets, it has had a massive impact. That's predominantly, that's in the hedge fund space.

That's in the big bank investment banking space, right? The trading floors, the FinTech space, on the other hand, is fun because FinTech is around because of the promise of technology, right? What could technology do? How could it transform how we, and how we think about everything? Yeah. At the moment, The Fed, for example.

Many regulators are very focused on trying to get rid of any manual labor, basically. They don't want anything manual. They want everything automated. But the danger behind that statement is that you don't just wanna automate what you've done manually. You wanna rethink it entirely, right? Not just how you do it, but why we do it.

Is it effective? Does it make sense anymore? The world has moved on, and so it's an opportunity. In so many places to just rethink what the financial space looks like. It's, the fintechs that are out there are su is super exciting actually. It's a fun, fun space, I think. Yeah,

Bobby: great energy and I think a lot of room for really useful, meaningful disruption, I think, and helping customers have a better experience.

Terri: Yeah, I mean, there is some disruption and it's funny because 12 years ago when we first started talking about FinTech, We all were terrified oh my god, FinTech, they're gonna disrupt all of us. We're not gonna be JP Morgan anymore. We're gonna be some dot com.

Because of course, 12 years ago, that's what we were talking about. But the truth is that disruption didn't happen very fast. It ate around the edges and it mostly targeted the retail space. In fact, not the institutional space. And what we've, what we say now is that actually. Collaboration is the new innovation.

And that, we have these debates in my classes about collaboration versus disruption. And the fact is that a lot of the big banks have huge portfolios of fintechs, right? So they're looking for the, to how to apply the disruption themselves, right? How to support and be a part of the disruption.

But of course we all know that it's incredibly difficult to disrupt yourself. So that's the challenge, right? Is that the large entities, it's hard to disrupt yourself. I believe though that entities are made up of people, and if people know how to reinvent themselves, then a business can disrupt itself, right?

So I talk about reinvention because at the moment it feels like the world is changing so fast that if we could all reinvent ourselves personally and professionally, then the businesses around us would also disrupt themselves naturally.

Bobby: So I like that a lot. Sadly, we're onto our last question, but it's a fun one.

So on your site you say you aren't the sum of your past experiences, you're a function of your future potential. So Terri, how do you see your future potential?

Terri: I keep saying that when I grow up, still today, when I grow up, I'm gonna do something amazing. I'm not a hundred percent sure what it is, but I am going to do something amazing.

I think I'd love to do something positive and powerful for the world, make it a better place. I just don't know yet what that is. It's gonna happen. I'm just gonna take, maybe I just need to grow up a little bit more.

Bobby: I think if I was to talk to your students and your colleagues, they'd say you're already, you've already done that in spades, and I've certainly learned a lot.

Talking to you. So this has been an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much, Terri.

Terri: Thank you for inviting me. We completely talked about totally different things than I anticipated what you were gonna ask. Actually,

Bobby: That's the fun part. Thanks again. That was Terri Duhon, board chair at Morgan Stanley, ambassador for women and passionate reinventor.

If you're interested in learning more about Terri or booking her for a speaking engagement, you can visit her website at TerriDuhon.com. And if you enjoyed our podcast, please and rate us. Until next time, I'm Bobby Mukherjee.

Terri Duhon
Board member of Morgan Stanley International, TedX speaker, author & Award Winning Educator

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