Working It
When I started college, I began as an engineering student at Cornell, one of the best engineering schools in the U.S. Like so many young men, I tended to show stronger grades and test scores for math and science than for verbal. That and a romantic sense of manly endeavors in the engineering world made me think that I wanted to be a civil or perhaps operations engineer. I actually did well in the first semester engineering course, which had a sort of design and civil aspect to it (I remember the floating dock project in particular). I also did quite well in the rudimentary programming course. It is almost so archaic to describe programs with Do-Loops that used BASIC language and punch cards for both the program and the data that it seems silly to talk about it as the equivalent of today’s systems engineering or computer programming. But for what it was at the time, I was not altogether bad at it and really quite enjoyed the intellectual challenge of designing and making programs run. I had wanted to be a chemist when I was in high school, but the first semester inorganic chemistry course, populated by every pre-med student in the University showed me how unfit I was for the rigors of a more scientific career. I also ran into the calculus buzz-saw and truly hit the intellectual wall that told me that I would not be able to climb that hill. I have no trouble admitting any of this since I made the right decision and shifted gears to transfer after freshman year into the College of Arts and Sciences. Since I am unsure I would have been admitted to that school from high school and since I feel I was well-served overall in my education at Cornell, I am happy to have inadvertently found the back door in through Engineering and the whole experience in both colleges served me well in many ways.
The thing that many people with whom I worked during my business career and certainly my family would find hard to fathom is that I was not so vocationally directed during college. For years, college had been the goal and the fanciful issue of what to do after to earn a living was simply not something I spent much time contemplating. I would like to think that was my way of saying that I was in college for the sake of a broad education and less so for gaining a skill or credential for the working world, but it may have just been the naïveté of a kid who grew up with a global development professional who thought more about making things happen than about making a buck. Most of my college friends will remember me as a guy who went through school somewhat undirected, especially compared to the pre-med and pre-law crowd, but even compared to the guy who became my best friend who was driven towards a five-year MBA. I only decided to eschew the development path in favor of going to business school to catch up on the 5-year program once I was in my senior year. During my three semesters of business school (starting in my Spring semester of senior year) I was entirely focused on getting through as much of the 60 credits as I needed for the degree (I got exactly to 60 in June following graduation, and have a September diploma, which is a one-of-a-kind at Cornell). While business school does cause one to think a lot more about jobs since everyone around you is so focused, I was doing more of exploratory interviewing than anything.
Sometime in the Spring of that graduate year I decided to pursue banking since it was general enough for someone who had rushed through as I had and seemed like a decent platform from which to survey the business world and my future preferences. I did manage to take a banking course and I certainly had my required finance courses to get my concentration in finance, but what I knew about banking would fit into a thimble. It so happened that in those days big NYC banks had training programs designed to accept undergraduate hires who needed more fundamental business education and for MBA’s like me who were assumed to need less, but still some standard bank training in credit skills. It was during my first summer at the bank, the pre-training period of two months before starting the MBA portion of the training program, that the working world drive really kicked in. I actually think that what spurred it on more than anything was the commutation process, which was unpleasant enough to cause me to leave earlier and earlier in the morning so that I could get in before the rush. By the time I was out of training and into my first assignment covering upper New England, I was getting into the office by 6am and getting up at 4am to make that happen from the suburb of Rockville Centre on Long Island, which is thirty-six scheduled minutes by train into Penn Station.
In life and in careers, realities build from perception sometimes and I quickly obtained the perception of a work beast that got into the office at the butt-crack of dawn. The thing that spurred that perception more than anything was when a very popular senior officer, who used to run every morning, would tell people that he only had one goal left in his career and that was to beat me into the office. What was extraordinary about this was that we were a firm of 11,000 people and I was not even an officer of the bank yet when he was using that joke. It established me as a hard worker and then all I had to do was live up to it, which I had a natural inclination to do. The rest was more reality than perception because I found that I liked the kudos I got for being a hard charger. In 1978, after only eighteen months in the saddle, I was awarded a bonus of $3,000 (my salary was $20,000 at the time). This may not sound like much today, but it was in the days when almost no one got bonuses in banking. Suddenly, linking hard work and kudos with compensation was all it took to make me realize that hard work did, indeed, pay off.
My compensation climbed further and faster than I had ever imagined it would, and it happened to coincide with the new culture of banking which became all about the rewards culture and the extreme differentiation in compensation which came to represent the money culture of Wall Street. As one of my academic colleagues, Bob Frank, put it in his book…The Winner Take All Economy, compensation differentiation was a noticeable trend that changed Wall Street into one of the highly-charged performance cultures.
So, for over forty years, I was trained to work hard…very hard. My family knew that every vacation I ever took was likely interrupted a bit at least by my work in one way or another. Now, i can finally declare that my work life, as I knew it and learned to do it, is over. It’s not that I am retired so much as what I have seen happen on this trip to Ithaca. While I have been footloose and fancy free to do as I want every day, I have watched my son-in-law John, a mortgage banker, working all day, every day into the night. Then my youngest son Thomas got here and even he had to be on several calls on the Friday before the long weekend. And there I was, pretty much doing nothing but deleting junk emails from my email account and truly not having to do anything. I will say here that I’m enjoying it, but the truth is that after so long in the saddle, an especially grueling saddle at that, it takes some adjustment, but I am working it.