Knowing Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You're Worth [Paperback]

Mika Brzezinski (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2012

Why are women so often overlooked and underpaid? In Knowing Your Value, bestselling author Mika Brzezinski takes an in-depth look at how women today achieve their deserved recognition and financial worth.

Prompted by her own experience as co-host of Morning Joe, Mika interviewed a number of prominent women across a wide range of industries on their experience moving up in their fields. Mika shares the surprising stories of such power players as presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett, comedian Susie Essman, writer and director Nora Ephron, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, television personality Joy Behar, and many others. Mika also gets honest answers from the likes of Donny Deutsch, Jack Welch, Donald Trump, and others about why women are paid less, and what pitfalls women face--and play into. Knowing Your Value blends personal stories with the latest research on why many women don’t negotiate their compensation, why negotiating aggressively usually backfires, the real reasons why the gender wage gap persists, and what can be done about it.

Written in Mika’s brutally honest, funny, and self-deprecating style, Knowing Your Value is a vital book for professional women of all ages.

Editorial Reviews

Review

TheAtlantic.com
"A rallying cry for women to get the money they deserve."

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook
“A lot of getting ahead in the workplace has to do with being willing to raise your hand…If we as women don’t raise our hands in the workplace, we’re not going to get the same opportunities men do. Because men keep their hands up.”

 

Nora Ephron, writer and director
“The words favored nations—that’s an expression all women should know. In other words, you always want to be paid no less than what anyone else is being paid.”

 

Arianna Huffington, president and editor in chief of the Huffington Post Media Group
“Just look around and you’ll see plenty of evidence that asking for what we want results not in the realization of our own worst fears but in getting what we want.”

About the Author

Mika Brzezinski is a co-host of Morning Joe, an MSNBC anchor, and the author of the New York Times bestseller All Things at Once. She is the mother of two daughters, Emilie and Carlie, and has been married for fifteen years to investigative journalist Jim Hoffer.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Weinstein Books; Reprint edition (April 3, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1602861609
• ISBN-13: 978-1602861602
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.6 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (77 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #284,705 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mika Brzezinski is the co-host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," a show Time Magazine calls "revolutionary" and the New York Times ranked as the top news show of 2008. In January of 2009 Mika launched and became the Co-host of Citadel Media's syndicated radio show "The Joe Scarborough Show".

Prior to joining MSNBC in January 2007, Brzezinski was an anchor of the "CBS Evening News Weekend Edition" and a CBS News correspondent who frequently contributed to "CBS Sunday Morning" and "60 Minutes." Brzezinski joined CBS News in 1997 as the anchor of "CBS News Up To The Minute," but took a short hiatus in 2000 to co-host MSNBC's weekday afternoon program "Homepage." In September 2001, she returned to CBS to become their principal "Ground Zero" reporter for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Brzezinski began her journalism career in 1991 in Hartford, Connecticut, as a general assignment reporter at WTIC. A year later she joined WFSB, also in Hartford, and quickly became the weekday morning anchor.

A native of New York City, Brzezinski is the daughter of Foreign Policy Expert and Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. She attended Williams College and received a degree in English. Brzezinski lives in Manhattan with her husband and two daughters.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 65 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Helpful insights for every career women; a must read May 16, 2011

By utka

Format:Hardcover

I have to admit, I did not have much of an expectation regarding this book. I picked it up at the bookstore to leaf through out of curiosity since I regularly watch the morning show she's on , and at times not really understanding the role she plays. What a surprise this book turned out to be!I could not put it down and ended up buying it and now buying many copies for my friends, mentorees and daughter in laws. I have spent the past 35 years , some would say very successfully, working myself up the corporate ladder, ending up as president of business units and companies. I experienced what she and her contributors have described in this book and I wish I had a book like this to read to 1) understand why I was behaving and feeling like I did, 2) why I let bosses and companies take advantage of me 3)understand better how to get for myself what I deserved....and overall to know I was not alone in this situation.
I think this book is a great resource for every woman, and especially relevant for young women starting out on the corporate ladder, especially when there is so much "fluff" is written on career advice. I admire Mika B's honesty, and her access to prominent women is really helpful in that, their stories may provide the motivation for some women to act on the advice given in this book.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing and dampening October 30, 2011

By Joanie D

Format:Hardcover

As a regular Morning Joe watcher, I'm a fan of Mika's and was excited to see what advice her wealth of respected experience would yield for this book. I was so disappointed to find that rather than using her pages to uplift women, she basically aired and re-aired her job grievances over and over again in an ineffective and largely uninteresting read. The book was unfocused and meandering. What I'd hoped would be more of a guidebook for how to determine and get what you're worth was actually a pretty defeatist smattering of high-powered women and their complaints about how men are paid more. Mika didn't actually get to how this is changing every day or give concrete advice for how you move past what roadblocks you may face as a woman in the workplace. An unfortunate use of her visibility as a highly successful woman.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Does not reveal how to know your value February 20, 2013

By Nathan Ives

Format:Paperback

Knowing Your Value: by Mika Brzezinski is a self confession and personal growth story about how a now prominent MSNBC morning show host discovered, demanded, and won compensation more inline with that of her peers. The story is complimented by the personal value stories and insights of over a dozen other leaders.

Why You Should Not Buy This Book

I dislike Knowing Your Value for several reasons. First, the book lacks sufficient method for actually determining your personal worth to an organization. Its premise is that an individual’s value contribution should be based on the compensation of others in similar positions. The shortfall with this argument is that each unique individual contributes differently to the organization and so offers his/her own value proposition. Additionally, there is an underlying assumption that the comparison employees have accurately identified and won their value – a premise that is often not true. Second, the book maintains a foundational assumption that the author was treated differently because she is a woman. While this may or may not be true, the comparison employees identified were noted as contributing significantly greater intellectual and creative works to their organization; suggesting that they were rightfully compensated more. Brzezinski discounts the fact that men, minorities, and other classes of people may also be undervalued, for the reasons she presents, and that everyone should methodically seek to identify and demand their value from employers.

For its shortfalls in revealing how to calculate one’s personal value contribution and its faulted underlying logic and assumptions, I recommend you not purchase or invest time reading Knowing Your Value.

Alternative Recommendation

I believe it is highly important for an individual to know his/her value and to aggressively seek it. Identifying one’s worth is not a matter of simple comparison with others or a fight against perceived discrimination but rather a deliberate methodological evaluation of the value contribution of the individual to the organization followed by the positive assertion of that value to those who can correct any imbalance. Such a methodology is presented by Larry Myler, Chief Executive Officer of By Monday, in his book, Indispensable By Monday: Learn the Profit-Producing Behaviors that will Help Your Company and Yourself.

All the Best,
Nathan Ives
StrategyDriven Principal