Success Quote by Harold S. Geneen

Geneen’s line reads like mentorship, but it’s also a power move dressed as wisdom. “Two coins” is the key framing: he recasts compensation as a dual-currency economy where money is only one unit of value and, crucially, not always the one you’re owed right now. It’s a neat rhetorical trick for the corporate world, because it turns delayed gratification into a moral posture. If you’re not getting paid what you want, the system can tell you you’re still being “paid” - in experience.

The intent is pragmatic and motivational: choose roles that teach you, because skills compound and eventually translate into leverage. Geneen, famous for running ITT with hard-nosed discipline and metrics, isn’t offering a dreamy self-help mantra. He’s describing a ladder. Early in a career, the most valuable asset isn’t your current salary; it’s the credibility, pattern recognition, and operational fluency that make you expensive later. Experience, in his view, is venture capital for your own earning power.

The subtext is more ambivalent. “Take the experience first” conveniently aligns employee patience with employer flexibility. It legitimizes underpaying talent on the promise of future reward that may arrive elsewhere, not “later” at the same firm. It also implies a hierarchy: the people who can afford to prioritize experience are usually the ones with a financial cushion.

Context matters: Geneen came out of mid-century American corporate culture, where climbing institutions was the dominant career script and loyalty was expected even when the deal felt lopsided. Today, the quote lands as both shrewd advice and a warning label: take experience, yes, but audit who’s actually minting the coins.