The Boy on the Bookshelf There was a time when my life was all about collecting tombstones. My Wall Street friends know what I mean, but for the rest of you that think I have some morbid adolescent taste for collecting grave markers, tombstones are those little Lucite mementos that are given out by investment bankers to memorialize a deal. When you realize that investment bankers don’t create anything tangible, you can better understand their…
The Beast Within James is not the man you think he is when you first see or meet him. Some people show you who they are with their cultivated look. I think Donald J. Trump announces to the world who he is with one glance. Warren Buffet looks exactly like what you would expect The Sage from Omaha to look like. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos may be otherwise ordinary in their appearance, but I…
What Do We Believe In? I used to work with a guy named Josh. I had an unusual history with Josh because I was never quite sure who worked for whom. Don’t get me wrong, Josh was never insubordinate, it was just that he had his own agenda and I was never quite sure whether he was following his agenda or the team’s agenda as set by me. I have always preferred to have independent–minded…
Digging Archeology John was perfectly happy living in Turrialba. He was five years old and where he lived was inconsequential to his daily activities and state of mind. He had lived his whole life, except a year in Santa Monica, in and around the equator. As a kid, he just made the best of whatever his circumstances. Perhaps if he had known that Turrialba was a remote and unknown tropical valley, two hours due east…
Chasing Wealth Twenty-five years ago, I was in my second career at the same bank. I had spent fifteen years rising like a meteor at Bankers Trust, a white-shoe bank of the old order (positioned originally at 16 Wall Street at the famous corner of Broad and Wall across from the NYSE, Federal Hall and JP Morgan). Lately the bank had become a renegade, exiting the retail banking business and focusing on “Merchant Banking”. It…
My Happiest Child I once heard the expression that you are as happy as your unhappiest child. I even wrote a story titled My Unhappiest Child. It is about my oldest son and I have never published it because I do not want to risk offending him in any way. I have worked with him for the past twenty years to get him on a good track and I feel he is on such a…
Going to the Dentist No one likes going to the dentist. I doubt even dentists like going to the dentist. Like many things in life, some things you do in order to prevent the horrible. It’s like Woody Allen’s old definition that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable and you should feel lucky if you were just miserable. Going to the dentist is miserable. Not going to the dentist will end up…
Being Contrite I was baptized a Catholic, but life on the road had my mother convert us to a Presbyterian upbringing. If asked, I say I am Christian, which is my way of declaring that I believe in the fundamental Christian dogma of the golden rule and the Good Samaritan, but I’m not very inclined toward the organizational trappings of any specific sect and I know Judaism and Islam have tenets similar to that dogma.…
The Top of the Hill I went to Cornell for two degrees. My mother went to Cornell. All three of my kids went to Cornell. I was on the faculty for ten years at Cornell. I have a home just off the Cornell golf course. I have served on countless Cornell committees over the years. My charitable contributions to Cornell rank number one in my gift-giving. Many of my oldest friends are from Cornell. I…
Thawing a TV Dinner When I was a kid, just starting in grade school, we moved from a remote tropical valley in Costa Rica to Madison, Wisconsin. It was January, which was the start of the school year in the one-room schoolhouse on the institute grounds where we lived. I had never seen snow and here I was in frigid 30 degrees below zero weather in the midwestern United States. The explanation was that I…