Читать книгу No One Ever Told Us That - John D. Spooner - Страница 7

CHAPTER 1
TAKE THE PRO TO LUNCH

I work in a big office, more than 200 people on two floors in the financial district of my city. The rookies sit in the boardroom, sometimes 15 to 20 of them, almost all late twenties to early thirties, all out in life, and all anxious. Occasionally, as I wander around the office to blow off steam, I'll stop, sit on a desk facing them, and talk to the young people informally, off-the-cuff, about how the money management business has changed over the years, what they should be paying attention to, and how to plan their future in the business. No one tells them these things. They hear nothing about institutional memory, what makes markets move beyond daily news bytes and how to really build a successful business and future.

Recently, one of the rookies came to see me in my office. “Can I come to work for you?” he asked.

“I'm flattered,” I said. “But my team is complete for now. But I will come by occasionally and speak to you all.”

“We don't get this stuff from anyone.”

“What did you major in, in college?”

“Economics.”

“That's too bad,” I said. “I try to hire people who majored in the classics. Or in history, or English. I want to surround myself with young people who know something about the past. Because knowledge about the past will help you so much with your future.”

I would suggest that all of you, no matter what jobs you have or jobs you want, seek out the oldest people in your present company, or the people who have worked there the longest. If they're still employed after long service, they must have something special to offer. So you should invite them to lunch, to buy them lunch. They'll be happy to do it and will tell you tales that will give you a different appreciation and insight into your business and the industry it's in. It will be much more valuable to you than most of the orientation and the too-often colorless meetings you attend regularly. These older people will be generous and important to your growth, because no one ever asks them to share their experiences, their histories. Often they might appear to be curmudgeons or seem intimidating. Set that aside and approach them graciously. They need the interchange as well, and will be very glad you asked them out.

It is important as you build a career to develop friends, both older and younger than you. The older ones can shape your development. The younger ones can keep you thinking young.

Take an old pro to lunch

CHAPTER 2
BEWARE OF EXPERTS

By now you're getting the picture that street smarts trump all in the advice department. None of you probably, at your stage of life, is going to have intimate conversations with the chief executive officers of the Fortune 500 companies – unless you are related to them. So you will have to get your life wisdom from the seasoned professionals with whom you work, particularly the ones who can talk as mentors and teachers, not those who preach from on high. Most of my investment ideas come from my smart clients and friends around the world, not from Wall Street analysts or research departments.

One of my clients, Peter Clark, ran a think tank in Pittsburgh, mostly concentrating on the defense sectors. I spoke to him perhaps 20 years ago and asked whether he had seen a certain article in the Wall Street Journal.

“I haven't read a newspaper in 15 years,” he told me, and this was the preference in news dissemination, because virtually every American read the papers.

“How can you not read newspapers?” I asked, surprised by his answer.

“Because 15 years ago I knew all about two subjects,” he said. “And every time I read about those two subjects in the papers they always got it wrong, so I said to myself, ‘If they’re wrong about what I know, what about the stuff I don't know?' And I figured if I don't read the press, I'll save over an hour a day of wasted time!” Apply this to your own wanderings through the media, and don't accept anything just because it's in print or on your screen, in blogs or tweets.

For an even more personal brush with alleged brilliance, I was at a business dinner months before the meltdown of our financial system, sometime early in 2007. My parent company, Citibank, was coming to Boston in a big way, planning to open 30 new branches, and attacking the city for business in all the areas Citi wanted to dominate, including loans and wealth management.

Citi invited key local employees to a dinner and asked us to bring guests who might become major clients of the bank. We were to hear a dog and pony show from two Citi directors; one of them who had been secretary of the Treasury and was now a door opener for Citi business all over the world. His pay was in the millions of dollars for relatively small-time commitment. The two directors acted as if they were doing us all a huge favor by stooping to speak to us colonists in Boston. The words superior attitude did spring to mind. But the dinner and wine were free, and, on business evenings, I did, and do believe, that good accidents do happen sometimes. But you have to be there for the good accidents to happen.

I brought two guests, one man who ran a high-yield mutual fund, another who was a local commercial real estate developer, both lifelong Bostonians, not easily seduced by out of towners.

The two Citi directors did a Fric and Frac commentary about the wonders of the bank, speaking as if the Holy Grail were available for us if we came on board. This is fine, of course, their wanting us to drink the Kool-Aid. But the tone implied, “We know better than all of you about almost everything. Listen to us; watch us, the models for so much that is good and smart, and worthy.”

One of my guests slipped me a folded piece of paper while the show rolled on. It said, “Neither of these two guys would know a real working American if they fell over one.” Citibank stock during the financial crunch of 2007–2009 fell from approximately $55 a share to less than one dollar. Whenever you listen to someone who is billed as someone you could never be, take it with several grains of salt.

Beware the so-called experts and their absolute certainty about the future

CHAPTER 3
IF YOUR COMPANY IS BOUGHT BY ANOTHER

I have been through dozens of mergers over 50 years, many of them shotgun marriages, with a lot of the companies we acquired done at bargain prices because the sellers were in desperate straits. One of these companies was quite famous in the investment world: E. F. Hutton. It had a campaign with the tagline for all the ads, “When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen.” It was going broke. Right after the merger, my wife and I were going on a company trip. It was a relatively cheap junket, by Wall Street standards, to a resort in Florida in June, when all the tourist prices were slashed. On a chartered bus we sat with a bunch of former Hutton employees, all bitching and moaning about the stingy new owners. “Remember that great trip to Paris?” they would say. “No, Rome was much better, and also London: every night Michelin-starred restaurants.”

My wife said to me, “Rome, London, Paris? We never went anywhere like that.”

“They went broke,” I said. “They're like a defeated army.”

“Yeah,” she said, “but they went broke in style.”

Wall Street could always create products and sell them to the public for a fee. It could merchandise the goods. It could not run a business. Which is why so many great names on the Street turned to dust, and their names disappeared.

Almost always when you see the press stories surrounding every big merger, the two chief executive officers (CEOs) are pictured shaking hands, toasting, and celebrating the grand event. And they say, smiling, with reassuring tones, “Nothing will change.” I will tell you that everything will change. It's the nature of mergers, like the losers and winners in wars. And there is no such thing as a marriage, or merger, of equals.

Machiavelli is still being read today, after 600 years. You should pay attention, of course, to your own careers and try to think in detached ways about this. If a merger of your company and another is announced, ask yourself, “Who is my rabbi, or protector, in this company, and is he or she likely to remain in a position of power?” If the answer to yourself is a bit shaky, I would drop the new CEO a personal note, and have it be a provocative one. It may, of course, be viewed as sucking up. And it is. But it is provocative, meaning in this sense, different from what most people would say, designed to make the recipient think, “Hmmm..” about you, getting you on his or her radar. How do you do that? Tell a little story about how you got hired, about an unusual hobby you have, a helpful observation about how something could be done better in the company, or something a client or customer suggested to you, showing your curiosity and enthusiasm about looking at problems in creative ways. The point is to separate yourself subtly from the crowd.

All mergers produce anxiety on both sides. Position yourself to be a personality, someone to be watched. Of course, you have to deliver, but first you have to plant a seed. And you plant it by being a little bit different.

There is no such thing as mergers of equals

CHAPTER 4
ENTITLEMENT

If entitlement is not your least favorite word, it should be. This word is used a lot in modern American society, particularly among the new adults we all see. I know young people who before they've ever cashed a paycheck, have been helicopter skiing in Canada, windsurfing in the Bahamas, sailing in the Greek isles, staying in suites at the Bristol in Paris, and on safari in Tanzania.

This is not sour grapes. It's just my fear that these blessings early in life give these people the very false sense that all of their adult lives will be more of the same.

My father drummed into me, at an early age, one of his favorite lines, “Just remember, life is really hard, punctuated by moments of brilliance.” And I now think this was right. He carried it to extremes, however. If he was given a new sweater for a present, he would not put it on until he had a day where he deemed himself worthy. Deprivation, because of superstition, is not a very healthy quality.

I went to college with a group of guys I called “the golden boys.” They were handsome, successful on the athletic fields and in their social lives, and comfy in their natural sense of superiority, in their belief that their lives after college would be a continuation of their early privileged childhoods. Life would be one continuous coming-out party. For almost all the golden boys, this was their finest hour, and life after school proved to be one disappointment after another. They found it very difficult to shake off childhood and reinvent themselves.