Catching Up
I had lunch with an old friend today. In actuality, this was a guy who worked for me on two occasions and worked with me on another project where he was positioned to be my #2 guy. He last worked for me twelve years ago, so since we have stayed in regular touch with one another, it is fair to say we are friends more than colleagues. There is a point in time when who worked for who and the relevance of that reporting hierarchy has little or no importance. We are long past that point and we are now friends, plain and simple.
In many ways, I always considered this guy to be closer to be a protégé than anyone else I ever worked with. His skill set and his way of going about the tasks of leadership and business-building were more like mine than any other I saw up close and personal. What that means is that he worked hard and smart and people generally liked working for him. Those were the qualities I saw in myself that were most valuable. Some of the people who worked for me and were more his peer at the time would not necessarily agree with my assessment, but I feel that is a matter of perspective. That could me I am perceiving it wrong or that they are too close to it (in a competitive sense) to allow them to see the situation clearly. With the passage of time, I have come to understand that the truth lay, as it so often does, somewhere in between the two perspectives.
When we worked together a dozen years ago, one of the sharper-tongued peers of his used to call him the Pope. The implication was that it was harder to get time on his calendar than it was to get an appointment with the Pope. At the time, I didn’t see that issue clearly because he met with me and returned my calls or emails very quickly. The reality was that like all of us, he had his priorities. However, where I might make sure to communicate with peers with dispatch, he tended to put them further down the priority list. This is what gave rise for his Papal designation and why peers thought he was only interested in getting ahead versus playing team ball. When I left my seat of power and before he left the institutional setting a few years ago, I was able to see these peers’ perspective a bit better as I was no longer in the high-priority response list and felt more like a person trying to get an appointment with the Pope. That is all past now since we are all out there on our own just people connecting with people, not titles connecting hierarchically with other titles.
When things ended a dozen years ago, we had a major debacle to deal with in our business. People either worked with me in the trenches (it was a battle that could not be won, but had to be fought) or they went conveniently missing. My lunch friend was one of those who was in the trench with me every day of the battle, so I had no complaints there. The U.S. Attorneys who were seeking testimony from us all made a few comments along the way that made me think that they were less happy with my friend’s level of cooperation than they were with mine. I didn’t know what they were referring to because I played the game by the book and the book says we were not to chat casually amongst ourselves about our testimony. I let it drop and figured it was either a passing comment or one intended to leverage some answer or situation we were discussing. I certainly learned in those days that U.S. Attorneys are not saints themselves and are perfectly capable of dirty tricks to get information they wanted. So, I just kept playing it straight.
At lunch, my friend made a comment about one of the bank’s attorneys that has found his way into the Donald Trump impeachment process on the Congressional side. With that connection made, it caused my friend to recollect that back during our testimony sessions, they had called him in and told him that the U.S. Attorneys did not believe what he was telling them. I asked what they were talking about specifically and he didn’t seem to have a clue. It then made me remember what they said to me about him and it all suddenly connected. It made me wonder what they might have really thought of me as well. It also made me wonder a bit about how he handled his testimony that they would take that position. Who knows? What I do know is that we are all way past it and neither of us have a mark on us from the episode (or at least not one that shows).
For five or six years my friend made a decent career for himself at the acquiring organization that bought our bank. I thought he was flying pretty high (as I would have expected given my view of his capabilities), but then suddenly he fell to earth. Strangely enough, while it was a big organization and I hardly understood the dynamics. The guy who cut him loose was a guy who also worked for me for a part of my time and who I thought had far less of the right stuff than my friend had. There are many stories in the naked city and many perspectives. Some people who I knew that rose to power make great sense to me, and then others are more surprising. All that and the possibility that I might have been wrong as much as right about any one person at any given point in time and circumstance.
While we were wrapping up lunch, which he was kind enough to pay for, I asked how old he was now. He told me he had just turned 60. Once again, those young bucks who I considered to be the younger generation of business leadership have managed to catch up, or nearly catch up with me. I have watched several rise to comparable levels as anything I ever achieved, one or two who exceeded my achievements and a bunch that fell short. I have an easier time understanding the perspective my old mentor (a Vice Chairman at my first employer) who I thought always wanted to know how I was doing career-wise. I was to him what my friend at lunch was to me. I guess we all keep track of things one way or the other to help us all remind ourselves of our positioning in the firmament. Were we a bright star that burned out quickly, a star that shone brighter than others or just a quick twinkle in the distance? I’m not sure it matters too much to the universe, but we astronomers like to keep track of things out there in the cosmos.
I am not sure that catching a star is something worth doing. It’s probably more like trying to catch a falling knife more than not. If it is burning brightly or has sputtered out, it is better not to compare ourselves to them, but just to be happy that we are all a part of a brilliant night sky in our own small way.
