How Wei Li became a BlackRock bigwig by making herself replaceable

This isn't our immediate conversation, of course. Nor is her introversion immediately obvious. She is friendly, lively, enthusiastic, and much better at eye contact than me. We end up having a longer lunch than expected; and even by the end of that, neither of us seems to be itching to get away for some quiet me-time. We're going to linger over ideas of authenticity and outsider-ness, and we'll also graze on the big issues in the global economy. But at the outset, when we still had a sense that a clock was ticking over our lunch, we had to make…