Playing the Waiting Game
This weekend I learned of the passing of an old colleague from Bankers Trust. He had been in hospice and I had tried to go see him several weeks ago, but was told by the family that he had faded too far by then. I jumped on the visit the day I returned from a trip, having heard he was in hospice when I left for the trip. I literally chose to try to go the day I returned, knowing that these things can move fast. I seem to have missed the window by a day or so. I’m not sure it made much difference to him given where he was, but it would have made me feel better.
I am going this evening to a gathering of old Bankers Trust pals (I worked at BT for twenty-three years from 1976 – 1999). The group is somewhat inflatedly called BT Legends and it is comprised of several dozen of the long-time old-timers from the days gone by. The defining characteristic of the members of this loosely formed club is that they were all lending or credit officers for most of their careers. That means if you were a corporate finance, trading or product/service provider at the bank the chances are you are not invited to be part of the group. It is as close to an old boys club as BT had even though there are one or two notable women members.
It’s funny because when I joined the bank it was already heading away from the pure money-lending business in favor of the intermediation and service-providing businesses. Just as we were moving to the models being successfully purveyed by investment banks and asset managers, they were moving more towards the capital-leveraging game we had been playing. Isn’t that always the way things go? The truth or best space lay somewhere in the middle. In fact, many of the BT Legends did move into other non-lending areas of the operation, but there was something lasting about making credit decisions and taking on the big risks that cause them to think of that as their highest and best use of their careers.
Initially in the first few years after we sold ourselves to Deutsche Bank in 1999, I was not invited to be a member of BT Legends even though I went into a venture capital business partnered with the president of the BT Legends club. He did not feel I was “credit-worthy” I guess. It’s true I had done more moving around than most at the bank and I has spent the last decade running asset management businesses (strangely enough that is where the recently deceased member of the club worked for me as my credit officer). I had to remind my partner that I had been responsible for recovering on $4 billion of LDC debt, which may have made me the biggest credit guy at the bank for four years. I had also in 1989 presided over and been properly banished to Siberia for the $125 million write-off to a certain cotton merchant in Memphis that, at the time, represented the biggest loss the bank had ever taken. I argued that I had certainly earned my credit merit and demerit badges and belonged in the club. He begrudgingly admitted me.
Personally, I suspect that there were some members that were less than pleased with my admittance. I had risen above most of them to be a member of the Management Committee during the tenure of the least beloved CEO in BT’s history, the man with the moustache that sold us to Deutsche Bank. Obviously I had brown-nosed with the wrong guy. I had also prospered under the much despised Germans as Chairman of the asset management business. This was only for a year and I was asked to do so by the Management Committee to insure the deal went through, and I worked for the Morgan Grenfell Brits rather than the Germans (and they hated the Germans enough for both of us), but that may also have added to the persona non grata. Maybe they also just didn’t like me….nah, that couldn’t have been it.
Anyway, since most of these old warhorses are older than me, these gatherings are pleasant in one sense and depressing in another. Having one so soon after a death may prove to be an even bigger downer even though paying our collective respects to a man that everyone respected and liked can’t be all bad.
I find myself waiting for this event tonight. It is the biggest thing on my agenda today. I’m not sure what that says, but I will partially attribute it to being Easter Monday (apparently a real holiday in the UK, where a lot of our staff reside). The rest of it is because there is always anticipation at these events. These are the guys I most relate to in my career, but these are the guys that were least easy to get along with much of the time. They might have been denying me credit at times. They were certainly questioning of my value added at every turn (if you’re not one of them that happens). The people like the mustachioed CEO and the Germans quite frankly (note the double pun!) treated me with more respect and paid me better than the old gang ever did. Nonetheless, I consider them the crowd I grew up with and the crowd I relate to more than any other business group.
One guy in BT Legends gang, perhaps the most senior of them all and an ex-member of the Management Committee of way back before I was on left me with a few gems. He’s the guy who told me that a CEO only makes 4-5 meaningful decisions during his career and his tenure stands on those decisions. He said that to me because I was grousing about something being done by our then Southern CEO. What he was basically telling me was to shut up and stand down, probably good advice at the time. He is the same guy who went with me to Pritikin in Los Angeles to lose weight, on orders from our company doctor. We were both warned by that doctor that he at 46 and me at 34 would both be dead in ten years if we didn’t heed his advice. That much-beloved corporate doctor, God rest his soul, died within the ten years, but we are both still here. He at 77 and me at 65. Last time I saw him he had a tooth missing, which I presume he was figuring he could just wait out until teeth were an unnecessary adornment.
I don’t mind waiting for a gathering, but I refuse to play the game of waiting for the end of days. I will keep all my teeth and replace any that need replacing. There are none of these guys I’m seeing tonight that probably figured I would still be standing at this point even though I am younger than most of them. I don’t want to play the game of waiting to go to their funerals because I hope they all live forever, but I sure as hell won’t hold my breath hoping they will come to mine.