Courtesy Counts Yesterday I finished up a two-day conference in Rotterdam. It’s 7am at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and I’m sitting at a lonely Delta gate waiting for the onslaught of passengers, ticket agents and duty-free agents to descend on this place for the 9am JFK flight. There is a large African man sitting ten feet away and he has not learned the basics of cellphone courtesy. He has taken several calls with an absurdly…
Bearding the Lion Let us start with how exactly one “beards”. Does it mean growing out your whiskers? I’m guessing not since, try as you might, I doubt anyone can force any beast to grow whiskers. Does it mean to grab the beard of the beast to annoy the shit out of It? I also doubt that. Grabbing a beast’s facial hair seems both difficult to accomplish given that it’s best weapon is probably its…
An Angry Man Back in 1987, over thirty years ago, I had a young man working for me who was very well-liked by everyone. He was a Midwesterner who was smart and shrewd, but generally mild-mannered. He had been a football player at a Division II school, and while tall and lean, he was also considered by everyone to be a strong athlete. In the two years he had worked for me, I had not…
The Shit-Show Yesterday the New York Times published an article that the Bond Market is screaming one of its worst signals by going into the rare and portentous inverted position. That means long rates are lower than short rates. That means people are getting bearish about the economy and liquidity is starting to dry up. In forty-five years on Wall Street I learned many lessons, but none starker than to pay attention to…
Planning the Beachhead Next week I am going to Rotterdam for a conference. It is a conference I attended last year, which in and of itself is meaningful in that it demarcates the passage of time in our current scientific and commercial initiative. Last year there were 150 in attendance. I suspect this year will be closer to 200 attendees. This is only the third year of this conference and given the money-making nature…
Integrity Matters Merriam-Webster says this: Definition of integrity 1: Firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values: INCORRUPTIBILITY 2: An unimpaired condition: SOUNDNESS 3: The quality or state of being complete or undivided: COMPLETENESS The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office. Dwight D. Eisenhower…
Nor Any Drop to Drink The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was his longest major poem and was written in 1798 and published in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. It is the story of an old seaman who takes a perilous voyage where he gets stuck in Antarctic waters until an albatross leads him out. The most famous line in the poem that most of us have heard is: Water,…
Money Laundering In 1994 I was asked by my superiors at Bankers Trust to take over the global private banking business. I had mixed feelings about the assignment since I had only been in my prior job for eighteen months (just about the time one gets a head of steam going) and private banking had been one of the backwaters of banking for years, being what was called a “walk the dog” service business. …
Remote Control If you are like me, you grew up with a romantic notion of what remote control meant. It involved gas-powered airplanes, speedboats, race cars, and even the Zenith TV in your living room. It implied this amazing and exciting ability to sit back and relax while you do minimal work to make your fun take place in hyper-speed. In that dream, you know exactly how the machine (whatever it is) operates. You understand…
Getting Over It I recently had breakfast with an old friend. This is someone who I had participated actively in recruiting for his job. I thought he was both highly qualified and appropriately aggressive, and that he would “move the needle” on leading the organization forward. There is a reason leaders are highly paid and much sought-after. Organizations need this impetus to progress and it is quite hard to accomplish. The euphemisms abound about…