Alone in the Vastness On a trip to Latin America, I bought a painting by a well known Argentine artist named Rikelme. We were hosting a client reception in Punta del Este on the gold coast of Uruguay, where the rich and famous play in January. Rikelme seems to specialize in painting landscapes that emphasizing trees. I’m a big tree fan when it comes to art. One of my other favorite artists is David Smith…
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…
Car Conundrum All the current literature tells us that the century of American heavy metal has come to an end. With 47% fewer 16-year-olds getting their driver’s licenses over the past three decades and autonomous vehicles coming on strong, the right of passage is quickly shifting off of getting a car and its respective independence. I’m not sure what marks the passage now, but whatever it is, I hope my kids handle it better with…
The Boy on the Bookshelf There was a time when my life was all about collecting tombstones. My Wall Street friends know what I mean, but for the rest of you that think I have some morbid adolescent taste for collecting grave markers, tombstones are those little Lucite mementos that are given out by investment bankers to memorialize a deal. When you realize that investment bankers don’t create anything tangible, you can better understand their…
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…
What Do We Believe In? I used to work with a guy named Josh. I had an unusual history with Josh because I was never quite sure who worked for whom. Don’t get me wrong, Josh was never insubordinate, it was just that he had his own agenda and I was never quite sure whether he was following his agenda or the team’s agenda as set by me. I have always preferred to have independent–minded…
Digging Archeology John was perfectly happy living in Turrialba. He was five years old and where he lived was inconsequential to his daily activities and state of mind. He had lived his whole life, except a year in Santa Monica, in and around the equator. As a kid, he just made the best of whatever his circumstances. Perhaps if he had known that Turrialba was a remote and unknown tropical valley, two hours due east…
Chasing Wealth Twenty-five years ago, I was in my second career at the same bank. I had spent fifteen years rising like a meteor at Bankers Trust, a white-shoe bank of the old order (positioned originally at 16 Wall Street at the famous corner of Broad and Wall across from the NYSE, Federal Hall and JP Morgan). Lately the bank had become a renegade, exiting the retail banking business and focusing on “Merchant Banking”. It…
My Happiest Child I once heard the expression that you are as happy as your unhappiest child. I even wrote a story titled My Unhappiest Child. It is about my oldest son and I have never published it because I do not want to risk offending him in any way. I have worked with him for the past twenty years to get him on a good track and I feel he is on such a…