Three Calls and Six Texts
I don’t do business dinners much any more. There was a time when it felt like I had one every night. I’m not sure I remember which job had the most of that, but I’ll bet it was during my private banking days. That was between 1994 and 1999 when I was 40-45 years-old and my children ranged between young and younger. I mention the children because what you mostly have to forego for business dinners is dinner with the family. When you run a business like global private banking you must, first and foremost, make time for clients. You must do private dinners for the most important clients and you must be available for functions and social gatherings which tend towards the high-brow stuff of wine-tastings, symphonies, operas, museum openings, sporting events and content gatherings (usually some form of economic or market forum). Beyond client dinners, there are staff leadership dinners, general staff “meet and greet” dinners for new or newly promoted officers, senior management dinners, partners dinners, peer group dinners and vendor dinners. Suffice it to say that if you wanted a free dinner every night of the week, this would be the perfect job for you and you could easily pull it off.
I recall one particular client function in my younger, more junior years handling clients in New England. This client and his wife were coming into New York City on a Sunday and were interested in seeing a New York Rangers hockey game at Madison Square Garden. I got four tickets to the bank’s six-seat box seats and booked us a dinner at the favored tourist restaurant of Tavern on the Green in Central Park. My first wife is and was a lovely woman who was very pleasant and agreeable, but really didn’t care for corporate entertaining. Having dinner and going to a hockey game on a Sunday night was not an easy ask of her, but she accommodated me and went along with a smile. It never helped that the clients were much older people who, in this case, were staunch Yankees from New England somewhere. In any case, we had a nice dinner and went on to the hockey game. Naturally, we had dressed for a client function and I was wearing a business suit. At the hockey game, the other two seats in the box were occupied by two young men who were decidedly not wearing business attire, but rather, more typical hockey jersey attire. It was normal for some tickets in the bank box to stray into the hands of officers’ children, especially on a Sunday night. As we sat down, my wife was in the seat nearest them, and heard them say mockingly among themselves, “what kind of dork wears a suit to a hockey game?” She felt the need to explain on my behalf and told them that I was there on business and hence the suit. They sat dumbfounded for a moment and then earnestly asked where they could apply for a job bringing people to hockey games. So you see, some people might value business entertainment more than others.
Nowadays, I only have a need to dine out for business occasionally. We have no clients yet, but a few partners and vendors. There is occasionally a staff dinner, but not do often. Several of my senior colleagues make it a habit to dine together and actually “party” together into the evening. This has never been my scene, mostly because I don’t drink, but also because I may have overdone this enough over the forty-five years of my career that I have scant desire to give up my evenings unless it’s really necessary.
I’m up near Boston tonight having spent the day with a partner company and our tech staff showing several evaluators (one engineer and one banker) our degree of technical readiness. It was a busy and intense day that we ended with an early dinner with our evaluating colleagues. We set an early dinner time on the theory that they had flown in from the UK yesterday and would be flying back tomorrow. I always feel everyone wants to get more, not less, personal time in the evening. The dinner was pleasant and we did our best to find topics other than business to discuss so that everyone could enjoy and relax after a long day. During the dinner my phone rang not once, not twice but three times. I also got six texts. This was an unusually heavy flow of outreach to me for a random weeknight.
Let me dispense with the six texts first. These tech review meetings are very important to my company as they are the basis of our go-forward thinking and it seems everyone was Uber-conscious of that reality. Everyone had the same two questions. They wanted to know how things went and they wanted to know what technical readiness level (TRL) we were deemed to have achieved. None of us even knew that the TRL scale existed six months ago and now we all know what we need and expect from this assessment. So, I chose to defer to later and then send a summary email with a brief status report for everyone to get answers to their questions.
As for the calls, I was curious to see a call from my son, a call from an old college friend and a call from an old business friend. I’m not sure the content was important on any of the calls, but I thought the juxtapositioning of the calls and texts during a rare business dinner made me recollect what my priorities in life need to be. This in no way is dependent on a particular or positive outcome of our tech review. Regardless, I spent way too many dinners focused on work and not focused on family or friends. While the business friend brought up a mutual investment, he also wanted information on Kim’s upcoming cabaret show. The college friend wanted to know how best to get to that same cabaret show. And my son, he just wanted to check on me and see how everything was going.
These types of calls are the stuff of life. My family and friends are and should be what matters most to me. Business calls and texts be damned. Business dinners be damned. I never let things get in the way of work and I need to start making sure that I never let anything get in the way of life.