Captain Bob It was in 1989 when I was running the Global Derivatives business of Bankers Trust. I was in London, one of our three big offices in the Derivatives business, in addition to New York and Tokyo. Suddenly I had an E.F. Hutton moment when the entire trading room goes quiet for a moment as someone from the derivatives desk yells over to me across the floor the Robert Maxwell is on the phone…
Home Ownership They say that pride of ownership means everything and I sometimes understand that and at other times ponder its wisdom. It has always appealed to me to think that this life is all about dust to dust and that in the long run, none of us own anything other than the love we give and the love we take with us. Everything else is flotsam and jetsam. I know that some families like…
What Goes Around In November 1985, I was sitting in my corner office on the third floor of 280 Park Avenue. I used to call that the “cafe” office because it was close enough to the street to feel a part of the hub-bub out on Park Avenue and yet it was above it all. To be clear, I was thirty-one years old at the time, which is almost hard for me to imagine in…
The Pain of the Number Last summer, when I knew I would be moving out to San Diego, I reached out to several schools in the area that had graduate business programs to see if there was any interest in my credentials as a ten-year-member of the faculty at Cornell’s business school and a forty-five year Wall Street business manager. The folks at the University of San Diego showed interest and I went at the…
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…
In Search of Content We have heard for twenty years, ever since the internet took serious root with the advent of widespread broadband, that content would be king. Like with many business imperatives, timing is everything and the world was not ready yet for content to be king twenty years ago. I would argue that to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the platform is the message and over the past twenty years there has been a great…
Gigging I alternate in thinking that I am on overload one minute and on pause the next. As soon as I find myself thinking that my situation is unique and a direct outgrowth of my own choices and circumstances, I read something or see something on cable news that makes me see people talking about exactly the same syndrome. Let’s think for a moment about that all-important baseline. My baseline is that I am 66…
The 600 Year Blink I read two enlightening articles this morning, one from The New Yorker and one from The Atlantic. It has occurred to me lately that in the age of digitized content, several magazines have seemed to be in ascendancy rather than decline like so many other magazines. In the pattern unfolding of the Coronavirus era, I sense that magazines will not be excluded from the tendency to accelerate the prevailing trends. The…
Deposing Views Today I was involved with an all-day deposition in a case where I am acting as an expert witness. I spent about 10-12 hours reading all the materials I had written on the case (1 46-page Report, 2 20-24-page Rebuttal Replies), the two rebuttals (each 25-30-pages) and various summary motions, articles, etc. I had worked on the case from late November through mid-January, when I wrote the first report. I spent 56 hours…
Ultimate Democratization The year was 2000 and we had just come through the Y2K scare relatively unscathed. It was not for lack of scrambling and effort as you may recall, so who knows whether we averted a crisis by getting out ahead of it by sounding the alarms, or if the concern was over-hyped and was never really a big risk. Either way, it was nice to see that Y2K did little to slow the…