“In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.”
Take the Experience First
From Harold Geneen with Alvin Moscow, Managing (Doubleday, 1984), chapter 3, “Experience and Cash” (pp. 51-82), where the line is the chapter’s epigraph. Geneen ran ITT from 1959 to 1977, growing it from roughly $700M in revenue to one of the largest conglomerates in the world, with over 300 companies in 80 countries, spanning Sheraton Hotels, Hartford Fire Insurance, Continental Baking, and Avis (ITT-era figures per general reference sources, not from this chapter). The book is his post-retirement account of how he ran it.
Geneen is addressing the reader early in a career, weighing which job to take. The chapter title puts the two coins in that order on purpose: experience is the one whose payoff is delayed, so the decision to take it has to be made up front, when the salary tradeoff feels real.