Connections
Being in the midst of this last week in New York City before moving to San Diego has meant that I have been taking all the offered lunch and dinner appointments with friends and colleagues that want to send me off with good wishes. Since most of those folks live, work or just hang out in midtown, it means I have been shuttling back and forth all week, but have told myself it’s important to do. It’s not even as though the people I am meeting with are necessarily my very best friends or colleagues (obviously excluding the dinner I have planned with my kids for Friday night). I have also taken meeting, like I most always do, with people who find their way into my inbox and want to meet. Usually they want to maintain a connection because they are transitioning between jobs and they think I might be able to make an introduction to help them. That is all fair and who among us hasn’t needed help with their career at some time or another?
I have always had a philosophy about meeting with people who want to get some help from me and that is to unequivocally do it and do it with gusto. I believe it is one of the things that made me a popular Professor when I taught for ten years at Cornell (students are ALWAYS looking for placement help) and I think it has served me very well with business colleagues. This is more than a simple pay-it-forward kind of approach (though I do like that notion). I will argue that doing good deeds by helping others is one of the most valuable things you can spend your time doing. This is not do-gooder thinking alone, though I do think that sort of selfless thinking has value in and of itself. Allow me to elaborate.
In the business I am currently running, one of the three big investors is a guy who I gave a chance to fifteen years ago. I did a good deed and continued to advise him in his career and now he makes $30-50 million per year as one to the top mortgage-backed securities traders in the world. Some two years ago he asked for help dealing with what he considered an underpayment to him by his firm. He felt he was being taken advantage of and wanted advice on how to respond. I gave him my best thoughts as I had for over a dozen years and he ended up getting an extra $7 million from them as a result. I wish every tidbit had that sort of impact. He then went on to inquire about my new venture and said he wanted to invest. The net result was that he invested $7.5 million in my business (I had suggested a cap of $5 million, but he was feeling very exuberant). Again, this was an unusually and directly linked causality that is rarely found in my experience. Nonetheless, one cannot help but think that the accumulation of good deeds was finally “repaid” in something more than a holiday fruit basket.
I have had two other meetings in particular this week that make me consider the importance of treating people well. The first involves a guy who asked me to lunch in midtown this week. He told me a few things I had never known about our relationship. He is a guy who lost his job with a big-time investment bank in the run-up to the financial crisis in 2008. At the time I was still stinging from my unplanned exit (voluntary, but forced termination from Bear Stearns), and in between bouts with U.S. Attorneys (witness-only, mind you), I was consulting with a new hedge fund group about setting up a pension finance capability. It seems that the day my friend got called in for his exit “you’re outta here” meeting, which came as a surprise to him, I had left a message on his voicemail telling him I wanted to meet him to discuss an opportunity with our fund. When he returned to his office to clear it out and before he was ready to call his newlywed wife to break the news, he listened to my voicemail message and that gave him immediate hope that there was life after career death. We met the next day and have been doing things with and for each other about the pension space ever since. At lunch he told me how well his pension consulting business was going and he asked me if I would consider speaking at a pension forum in San Diego in March, adding that I could charge my normal consulting fees to do so. He insisted on paying the lunch bill. He felt good and I felt good.
The other meeting was with a man who worked for me at Bear Stearns thirteen years ago. He actually worked for someone who worked for me. He has had a fine career since then, earning about $1 million per year, but was terminated six months ago in favor of a younger, more junior and cheaper replacement. He told me that what he does is generally now valued at $300k/year and at age forty-seven he doesn’t know what to do. I understand that many people in the world would do handstands to be able to earn $300k/year and that this is hardly a tragedy in the grand scheme of a tragic world, but it was a serious problem for this guy. What I did next I have done countless times over the years for people in similar work situations. I listened to his laments and plucked out key comments in order to divine a new path for him. I spent perhaps thirty minutes putting myself in his shoes and asked myself what I would do in a totally objective sense. The choices are always more or less the same: accept your new reality and adjust to accommodate, toss it all and start over, or find a way to reinvent yourself in your space in a new and more compelling manner. The third option is not always possible, and it can lead down some false paths, but it can usually be found if you try hard enough.
I am reminded of a Wall Street Journal story I read a few years ago about a Korean music teacher who was eking out a living with individual lessons. He took the bold stroke of building an online music teaching method using his existing skills and has successfully turned it into a thriving online business. He is now one of the wealthiest people in Korea and is known and loved by many who owe their musical talents to his online instruction. And yet, he is still the same piano teacher he always was.
I spent my thirty minutes in my colleague’s shoes and came up with an idea of what he should try to do that feels a lot like a form of reinvention to add value to any number of hedge funds. The solution is all about putting yourself in the hedge fund’s shoes and thinking about their problem, and then applying your skill set in a unique and differentiating manner to give them value that they very much need. Basic consulting stuff, but it’s amazing how many people don’t step out of that box and think outside it, as they say.
In this case I think I saw the penny drop and I suspect that guy is working on some form of what I suggested as he reinvigorates his search for his next opportunity. The only thing I asked him for as he thanked me and left was that he keep me apprised of how this all turns out for him. I have no assurance he will do that. My guess is that he will if he needs more help from me and he might not if he goes another path or even succeeds on the path I started him on. I try not to worry about the backside of the process and prefer to focus more on how valuable connections of all types are in the long and winding road of business life.