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…
The Last Angry Man Fred was livid and inconsolably so. The thing was, he didn’t really know why. He was generally an upbeat and pleasant sort that usually started each day with a smile and an optimistic outlook. There had to be a reason he was so angry so he decided to set about figuring why. Fred had had more than an average amount of success in his life and in his career. Yes, it…
Sun on the Harbor Jim walked into his office at 7:30am and while he wheeled his carry-on bag to the back wall and took off his coat, it was hard not to notice the view. The history of the United States was virtually laid out before him. No joke. He was looking out over New York Harbor on a sunny early March morning and it was nothing short of spectacular. Let me set the scene. …
A Random Walk There is a concept in investment management called random walk. It’s exactly what it sounds like, one movement is not connected to another and is therefore random in nature. It is the Shit Happens of finance, and it is used to describe the stock market and its gyrations. As a guy who managed very large money management businesses for many years, I spent some time thinking about random walk theory and whether…
Generalist/Specialist Expertise One of the greatest balancing acts I have ever encountered in business is the choice between being a generalist or a specialist. I’m not sure how many people focus on this juxtaposition, but I believe it is a primary choice that every professional must make. Some will suggest that this does not apply to people who choose a specific professional track like medicine or law, but I think this choice exists in almost…
The Meanness of Meaning I just finished reading an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about how miserable in their work 895 Class of ‘01 graduates of Harvard Business School are. Imagine that, the best and the brightest, earning over seven figures being unfulfilled in their work. It sounded in the telling like the root of the problem was money. Imagine money being the root of all evil. Oh, that’s right, they’ve been…