Cactus Flowers

Cactus Flowers

Many years ago (almost thirty) I was a banker with an office on Park Avenue. In fact, I had a corner office facing in the preferred Southeastern direction so that I had a lovely view down towards the Beaux-Arts Helmsley Building (what used to called the New York Central Building) that frames the visual end of midtown as Park Avenue traffic goes through regal archways in the building’s base to circumnavigate the old Pan Am Building (now called the Met Life Building) and Grand Central Terminal. In many ways, that complex is more the center of New York than Times Square or anywhere else. I have had the pleasure of being in a meeting in the old Penn Central Board Room that was on the 36th and top floor of the building, looking north up the endless expanse of Park Avenue. It was a fine room with an even finer view. Some think of New York City as a bed of thorns, but even if that is so, it has its lovely blooms like that building and that room.

When I was in the midst of my career arc in banking and mud-wrestling colleagues, competitors and issues in that great office, I took over a business at the request of the Vice Chairman who wanted a fresh approach to a dying business. In some ways, my career was defined by being asked to turn undertaking businesses and turn them into overtaking businesses. I’m not sure how or why that happened, but it suited my contrarian approach to banking because it required less crank-turning and more creativity. I was repeatedly being parachuted into the fray, given the proverbial dime and simple compass and told to lead the troops home for Christmas (how’s that for mixing metaphors!). The hard part was to convince the managers suddenly placed under my command that things would be different, that I would not disregard their ideas or devalue their experience and that together, we might find our way out of the morass. They rarely tried to deny the problems, but they often had lots of diverse rationalizations for the ragged state of affairs.

On one such assignment, I was coming, literally, out of left field. I had been sent to Canada for a stint in the gulag and had managed to not only survive, but, indeed, to prosper and cause my jailers to do what rarely happened. They brushed off my old uniform. They put my picture back on the wall in the Kremlin. And they gave me a ticket back to Moscow. This was my first post-rehabilitation assignment and it was a mess of a business where we were losing our global leadership position and we were actually losing money on every new piece of business we took on. In other words, it was in deep shit. Where was the harm in giving this to a recent gulag prisoner who had nothing to lose?

As I settled into my new office (I had had others like it in this and other buildings from which we operated), I heard a knock at the door (I rarely closed my door unless I needed to be in a private meeting). In walked Rajan, who I knew from our last partners’ meeting at some offsite resort or other. Rajan was a short, slender man in his late forties who’s heritage was from southern India. He had gotten his engineering degrees at IIT, the top tech school in India and then he had done his graduate work in the U.S., where he had chosen to stay and build a career in financial services consulting. Rajan was smart and savvy and had made partner within the last year, being the first partner from Southern Asia (even though he was, by that time a U.S. citizen). His specialty was a combination of technology and business models. Like all smart specialists (in his case, technology), he considered himself an expert in business processes and how to make the most of any business situation. The truth was that Rajan, like many competent trained strategic consultants, was extremely capable. I didn’t know Rajan well, but he did not look like a happy man that day.

Rajan had just come from the Vice Chairman’s office. The Vice Chairman had been his boss’ boss. His boss had been relieved of command and had become a minister without portfolio for the moment. Rajan assumed that he was the contender to that job since he had just made partner, but that was not to be. In those days, our Chairman was, indeed, a redneck of the ultimate order and while that was a reasonable expectation that he might have nixed Rajan’s ascendancy, it was not the case. The Vice Chairman himself had opted not to elevate Rajan for reasons I can only piece together. He had done nothing wrong and was well-considered, but he was in control of a business that was losing its leadership position. He was holding on too tight when the changing landscape suggested that loosening the grip and standing back to consider how to embrace the market change was more necessary than not. Some can do that and others, like Rajan, were less nimble. My job that morning was to keep Rajan onboard at a very dicey moment so that I could retain his expertise, which was extensive.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to gain Rajan’s trust, I just knew that I needed to do it. As I invited him in and closed the door, he dropped into the sofa in a way that screamed resignation. I didn’t mean resignation of his employment, but resignation to his fate. He was too well-paid as a partner to let pride cost him his partnership interest. But a broken person was far less valuable to me than a person who had enough gumption to help me transform the business in some way or another. I have found over the years that people assume that a new boss has his playbook already prepared and ready to go. It is a miscalculation made by people who have spent lots of time thinking about how they would do things differently if they were queen for a day. The brand new guy, if he really is new to the business and if he’s smart, will stay totally open minded and work with the most knowledgeable people he can find to create a playbook. Naturally, Rajan’s opening salvo was to dejectedly say that he was sure I knew what I wanted to do and that I wouldn’t be needing him.

This is where the work begins and it has little to do with the business and mostly to do with psychology. Rajan was an inordinately sharp dresser. He had realized years ago that if you ran an operating business, you could choose to look like an ODB (Operating Dirt Bag) or you could dress as sharp as any uptown guy. Rajan knew which kind of manager he wanted to be. In those days of the early 90’s, Hermès and Ferragamo ties were all the rage. They were $75-$150 apiece and a sharp eye could discern this year’s model from last year’s. I had always bought ties off the discount rack and would never pay more than $40 for a tie. But I had an unusually fine eye for detail and I saw that Rajan was wearing an Hermès tie I had never seen before. It was a pastel pattern of coral and sage with little cacti of all types all over it. And down in the lower right, offset from center there was one little cactus with a bright flower on it. I noticed the single cactus with the flower and mentioned it to Rajan.

He was so taken aback that I would notice such a small detail in his attire, a detail I was sure he had chosen with great attention. I said to him, “are you the flowering cactus?” That was the beginning of a long and solid friendship that has transcended several professional situations and is now just about two old friends in retirement. I don’t know about Rajan, but I look out at one flowering cactus or another every day.