Kevin Warsh: Trump’s Fed Chair Pick, Advice for Gen Z on Workplace Merit
even as the job market feels frozen for many Americans, one man is on the verge of landing one of the most powerful roles in the global economy-and it comes with a $250,000 salary and a soon-too-be shiny headquarters.
Kevin Warsh is President Donald Trump‘s pick to serve as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, replacing jerome Powell when his term expires May 15. While he still faces a elaborate Senate confirmation before securing the job, Warsh’s early lessons in leadership came from an unlikely first job: a horse track.
At 14 years old,Warsh worked setting up kegs and hauling ice at the Saratoga,New York,racetrack before later earning a promotion selling programs and pencils to bettors streaming through the gates.
“I learned a lot about hard work,” the 55-year-old recalled to the How Leaders Lead podcast. “I learned a lot about trying to keep track of your pencils as there was good margin in pencils; we billed them as lucky Saratoga pencils that would go with the program… And at the end of the day, if the number six horse won, that would be the guy who’d come back and give you a tip.”
Warsh would later go on to study public policy at Stanford and law at Harvard before climbing the ranks of Morgan Stanley. Along the way, he said, he learned that how hard you work matters far more than anything else in the workplace.
“Merit really carried the day,” warsh said. “As you show up in your job-in government or in the private sector-with skills, with knowledge, with insight, and also huge amounts of humility, age and rank seem to matter a lot less in almost every place where I’ve been.”
“Title was the least critically important thing,” he added.”Ability to contribute to the team, to execute, were much more appropriate.”
Kevin Walsh’s advice for Gen Z: Skip the leadership books-study real leaders rather
Kevin Warsh’s career has put him in rooms with some of the most powerful figures in finance, government, and business (after all, his father-in-law is Ronald Lauder, a billionaire businessman and heir to the Estee Lauder