The Regulatory Tent I watched Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America on Morning Joe this morning. I met Brian a few times when he was back running Fleet Bank. He is in Washington to go before Congress with some other bank CEO’s to talk about whether ten years after the financial crisis, banks like Bank of America are still too big to fail. Listening to him discuss the state of the financial services industry…
A New Day Funding start-up entrepreneurial efforts is always a challenge. Your best day is the day when everyone agrees to the next round of funding and puts their money in. Today is such a day. Your worst day is the day you are low on cash and you have to tell the board and investors that you will need to begin shut-down processes tomorrow if funding is not obtained. Yesterday was such a day. …
Dawn in Ithaca The sky has a strange cast to it this morning. It is still rising in the East, so the world is not too disoriented. But the low bands of clouds near the horizon have taken on a pinkish hue. The banding of pale blue and pink creates a beautiful and unusual sunrise. Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. What do the old sailor’s yarns say about a blue and pink striped…
Teaching and Preaching I am an outrageous guy. What makes me particularly outrageous is that I am prepared to tell everyone about my outrageous behavior and turn it into a life lesson for others. For ten years I was a Clinical Professor of Management at Cornell. That gave me the platform to tell over 2,000 students all about the lessons from my forty years on Wall Street and the lessons learned. I reveled in the…
The Moment of Truth I have, for some reason, made a habit of living on the brink, usually looking squarely into the abyss. This has not been a life decision, but it does seem to be a career decision. I do not want to talk about the exact nature of the abyss I am looking into at the moment but suffice it to say that the fork in the road is rather dramatic. One route…
Roller Coaster Design and Maintenance Jim’s wife came at him with an unusual question. Had Jim ever told the night doorman of their apartment building that he was a designer of roller coasters? Sometimes comments take on a life of their own and once they go through the mill they morph in all kinds of interesting ways. When Jim was in between marriages he had dated a woman who was teaching him Spanish. He immediately…
On Innovation When I was in high school I can remember going to visit my aunt and uncle who had previously owned a grocery store. They had an old adding machine that fascinated me. I would play with it for long hours. When I got to college, as a freshman engineer I took a computer programming course and learned how to write do-loop operands using IBM punch cards that we would submit to a computer…
The Beast Within James is not the man you think he is when you first see or meet him. Some people show you who they are with their cultivated look. I think Donald J. Trump announces to the world who he is with one glance. Warren Buffet looks exactly like what you would expect The Sage from Omaha to look like. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos may be otherwise ordinary in their appearance, but I…
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…