Nerd Intersectionality

Infancy is not what it is cracked up to be. The child seems happy all the time to the adult, because the adult knows that the child is untouched by the real problems of life; if the adult were similarly untouched he is sure that he would be happy. But children, not knowing that they are having an easy time, have a good many hard times. Growing and learning and obeying the rules of their elders, of fighting against them, are not easy things to do. Adolescence is certainly far from a uniformly pleasant period. Early manhood might be the most glorious time of all were it not that the sheer excess of life and vigor gets a fellow into continual scrapes. Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.

It is to old age that we look for reimbursement, the most of us. And most of us look in vain. For the most of us have been wrenched and racked, in one way or another, until old age is the most trying time of all.

— Don Marquis, “The Almost Perfect State”

I was browsing the online portal for the My Emotional Wounds Are Bigger Than Your Emotional Wounds Victims’ Society¹ this morning, O Dearly Beloved, when I encountered an essay by feminist firebrand Laurie Penny in which she took MIT Professor Scott Aaronson to task for justifying nerds’ insensitivity to male privilege in the technology industry. Notwithstanding some hyperbolic posturing about what Penny calls the “disaster of heterosexuality” [sic], it reads as a sensitive and revealing first person demolition of the notion that white male nerds faced some sort of unique hell growing up that can possibly justify their current behavior. I’ll let you go ahead and read it, if that’s your sort of thing.

If it is not, or you are back already, I would prefer to direct you to an earlier essay by computer nerd Pete Warden, cited approvingly by Penny and unfamiliar to me until now. In his essay, Warden, a die-hard, early adopter hacker type übernerd, correctly points out (in inimitable nerd fashion) that technology nerds, far from being the underdogs they so painfully remember being in their adolescence, are now Kings of the Hill:

We’re still behaving like the rebel alliance, but now we’re the Empire.

This is spot on. But then Warden goes and ruins the ride when he corrects Marc Andreessen’s assertion that nerds and bros are natural enemies with this:

Sure, we used to be picked on or ignored by the bro’s, but that was when we had no money or power. Now we have status, bro’s are happy to treat us as buddies instead of victims, to the point that we’re unlikely to think of them as bro’s. I’ve pitched most VC firms in the Valley at one time or another, and a lot of the partners come from business or finance backgrounds. There are nerds in there too of course, and they do control the culture, but they also get along perfectly well with the preppy MBAs. The same holds true across the whole tech industry – they might have tried to steal our lunch money twenty years ago, but now they’re quite happy running biz-dev while we do the engineering.

This is very muddled thinking as well as remarkably tone deaf observation as to what and who constitutes a “nerd” and a “bro” and the differences between them. But what should one expect from a nerd?²

* * *

Mr. Warden seems to identify the venture capitalists (“VCs”) and business development (“biz-dev”) colleagues he interacts with as bros because they have business or finance backgrounds, MBA degrees, and/or wear “preppy” clothes. This is just dumb. I have met a number of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and BD personnel over the years, and I can tell you from personal experience most of them would only come across as bros to someone who lives in a basement cave and thinks real women look and dress like Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. These people are as nerdy as they come. Sure, they prefer to geek out over cash flow statements and Definitive Purchase Agreements rather than hexadecimal code and API protocols, but geek out they do. They are just as scary smart, obsessive compulsive, and single minded as any computer hacker/programmer, and they tend to have the same awkward social skills as everyone else on the Asperger Syndrome spectrum they share with Mr. Warden and his peers. To the casual observer they may look and dress the same as a B– average fraternity brother from a state school, but they didn’t earn summa cum laude economics degrees from Stanford or the Ivy League, get Baker Scholarships at Harvard Business School, and claw their way into a partnership on Sand Hill Road from Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs because they liked to drink beer and flick bottle tops at computer science majors from the porch of their frat house.

Successful venture capitalists, private equity professionals, hedge fund managers, and investment bankers are as nerdy as they come. I mean, please: look at John Doerr, David Bonderman, Bill Ackman, and Lloyd Blankfein, for chrissakes. Those were the kids the football team beat up for lunch money in high school. Apart from shorter haircuts, plaid shirts, and an unfortunate predilection for chinos as casual wear, financial professionals share remarkably few of the features of true bro culture. In fact, you’re much more likely to find them running an ultramarathon or climbing Machu Picchu in their spare time than eating nachos on the couch in front of a football game. They are weird, they are driven, and they are the same awkward misfits who spent Saturday nights in high school doing extra credit calculus problem sets while the popular kids went out to drink beer and try to get laid. That is what I did, and I guarantee you it is what most of my colleagues and counterparts did too.

Now as is the case for all such qualities (and inconveniently for our current cultural obsession with identity politics), nerd-ness and bro-ness do not fall neatly within clearly identified boundaries of specified human communities. There are individual variations, there are community sub-groupings, and there are temporarily adopted behaviors that blur the picture. Within investment banking, for example, the tendency toward bro-ness tends to be larger in the capital markets division and, within that grouping, most strong among salesmen and traders. These are often the closest you will find to the backslapping, hail-fellow-well-met stereotype of good looking, easygoing bros who would be happy to watch football on TV instead of running another ultramarathon with that nut job client Ted from Citadel. But these folks have good degrees and sharp intelligence and nontraditional pastimes, too. The days of the high school graduate or C student on the trading floor are long gone. You’ll also find derivatives structurers within large bank capital markets divisions who I wager even Messrs. Warden and Andreessen would have a hard time differentiating from hardcore hackers and computer geeks. That is because that is exactly what they are, or were, before they donned the button-down and chinos uniform of their chosen career.

There is also, at junior levels, a lot of bro-ish posturing done by male investment bankers early in their careers when they are young, single, and so overworked they couldn’t spend all the money they make if they tried. In the boom years before the Crash, this often manifested itself in the desire to live the “models and bottles” lifestyle, where 23- and 24-year-old men went hunting for pretty women and expensive booze and mostly made obnoxious fools of themselves instead. (Of course that lifestyle—or, rather, the aspiration to that lifestyle which mostly generated exaggerated stories and outright lies—is long gone.) It still takes the form of the aggressive one-upmanship and macho dick measuring³ junior bankers haze each other with when they feel insecure, which is almost always. You only have to overhear this once, however, to realize it is nothing more than a bunch of awkward, self-conscious nerds who didn’t get laid enough in high school desperately trying to convince each other they did.

Of course, for some of us, this never changes.

* * *

Stepping back a little, I think I can assert without meaningful contradiction that, far from being limited to nerds or geeks or some other subculture, having a traumatic adolescence is almost universal. Everybody who makes their way through high school is, in some more or less meaningful way, faking it. Everybody wants to belong, be liked, fit in, and be popular. Everybody. It is human nature at that age, when we are still trying to define who we are. Why shouldn’t we look to our peers and popular culture for affirmation? But very few of us get it, to our satisfaction, so we channel our energy and ambition and hurt into schoolwork, or programming, or geeky hobbies instead. And many of us turn that sublimated effort into meaningful careers in geeky, nerdy fields like technology or finance, and find ourselves many years later, grown up, to be the socioeconomic successes we never dreamed we could be when we looked longingly at the cheerleaders and football players we could never have or be.

There is no cure for adolescence but to grow up. There is, however, a cure for adolescent trauma: get over it. And don’t use it as an excuse to oppress or traumatize others.

Unless, of course, you are Carl Icahn.

Related reading:
Laurie Penny, On Nerd Entitlement (New Statesman, December 29, 2014)
Pete Warden, Why nerd culture must die (Pete Warden’s Blog, October 5, 2014)
Taxonomy (January 14, 2007)

¹ Also known as the internet.
² Please, before you embarrass yourself, let me stop you before you argue there are very specific definitions for terms such as “nerd,” “geek,” “bro,” and the like. Really? You want to go there? Trust me: you don’t. Go back to arguing about lightsaber construction methods on the Star Wars wiki instead.
³ About pivot tables in Excel and PowerPoint formatting, no less. I ask you.

© 2015 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

A Fine Disregard for the Rules

I’ve been trying to figure out how to share with you, O Dearly Beloved, just why it is that the current snowballing trend of reducing working hours for junior bankers in my industry¹ is so wrongheaded. Clearly, I am swimming against the tide here, as now Credit Suisse and Bank of America have joined the political correctness police at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan to dissuade our nubile young apprentices from their traditional practice of working hours that would make a Southern slave overseer of the 1860s blush.

The unwashed commentariat continues to flog the canard that investment banks are doing this so they can compete against the innopreneurial juggernauts of Silicon Valley for all the special young snowflakes of Dartmouth, Yale, and Oxbridge. Perhaps there is a contingent among the benighted paper pushers of investment bank human resources departments who believe this too, but I have attacked this superficial notion thoroughly and, in my opinion, effectively in the past. Suffice it to say here that 1) since Wall Street is shrinking we don’t need as many junior resources as before, 2) the number of college graduates who simultaneously aspire to be J. Pierpont Morgan and Steve Jobs (or even Bernie Madoff and Mark Zuckerberg) is now and always has been nil, and 3) if having an in-house masseuse, pool table, and artisanal toast barista is important to your career satisfaction, you were never going to last longer than 15 minutes on Wall Street anyway.

Good riddance to all such rubbish, say I. And I am not alone. Like many industries in secular eclipse, we will fall back on our traditional recruiting pool of hardcore finance junkies who find an elegant DCF model and a sharp suit far more exciting and satisfying than virtual farm animals and flip flops. À chacun son goût, dontcha know.

* * *
There is another angle which a few more perceptive observers have been pursuing on this topic, however, that deserves to be addressed. This is the contention that the fabled 80, 90, and even 100+ hour workweeks and almost constant weekend work which junior bankers have been known to suffer (and competitively crow about to all who would listen) do not mean said tyros are working hard that entire time. Rather, they are the result of massively inefficient work processes. This observation is absolutely correct.

Rare is the Analyst or Associate in Corporate Finance or M&A who rolls into the office before 9:30 or 10:00 am on a workday,² and rarer indeed is the one who actually starts to do anything really productive prior to the time senior bankers begin streaming out of the office at 7:00 pm. So well known is this phenomenon that even ex-lawyer-cum-derivatives-structurers from the capital markets side of obscure banks can write authoritatively about it. This is not, pace certain sociologically-oriented observers,³ due solely to the fact that senior bankers want to haze juniors like they were hazed in their youth, or that it is a conscious program of brainwashing designed to leach out whatever shreds of self-preservation and flimsy moral scruples said youngsters might have left after four years of elite higher education so they can promote our deviously immoral plots against all that is holy and good in society for senior bankers’ personal gain. Not solely, anyway.

No, this massively inefficient workflow arises organically out of the nature of the work we do. Typically, a junior banker will roll into work relatively late because she was at work until midnight, one, or two o’clock the previous night finishing the corrections or first draft of a presentation or model which a senior banker dumped on her desk before he went home and demanded be put on his chair overnight for when he arrived in the morning. It will often take several hours, if not all day, for the senior banker to review the changes and give them back (for why, see infra), so the junior banker will fill her morning with odds and ends of other projects or deals she is working on plus the inevitable conference calls with clients and internal meetings on live and prospective deals. Afternoons are more of the same, with the addition of new assignments and working meetings on current projects with immediate superiors like Associates and Vice Presidents, who will always have their own corrections, suggestions, and annoyances to impart to the beleaguered young banker, plus informal conferences and bullshitting sessions with her peers in the bullpen. Add to this workflow pattern the complication that most junior bankers are working on multiple live and prospective deals or projects at the same time, all of which are in various stages of completion, activity, and panic level, and you begin to see that a junior banker’s workday is one of constant juggling and interruption.

This pattern applies in corporate finance and M&A generally, as bankers at every level have their mornings consumed by reacting to overnight developments in the news and their own ongoing projects and their afternoons and early evenings consumed by internal and external meetings and conference calls which are designed to push said projects further toward completion. Senior bankers like me, who are responsible for originating and closing all the deal revenues which pay for this goat rodeo, come in to a stack of presentations and models to review, a stack of emails and phone calls to and from clients and colleagues to reply to or initiate, and a calendar chockablock with conference calls and meetings with deal teams, colleagues from other departments (who actually do much of the work we get paid for), and, of course, the all-important client. And this is just on non-travel days, when we actually have a full day in the office to “catch up” on this shit. Rare is even the most well-intentioned senior banker who is able to carve out 20 or 30 minutes to review the presentation a junior banker turned overnight for him before his clients and capital markets colleagues leave work at the end of the day and the telephones stop ringing. Many a time have I rolled into the office at 7:30 am fully intending to turn my comments on an urgent pitch waiting for me on my chair by the time the Analyst or Associate comes in at 10, only to get to it for the very first time at 7:00 pm. This is commonplace.

Similarly, senior bankers, if they are lucky and doing their job, will come up with new assignments, projects, and prospective deals during the course of their phone calls and meetings each day. Given the relentless interruptions senior bankers are subject to themselves (see supra), it is the extremely rare (read nonexistent) Managing Director who calls up the poor slob Vice President tasked with distributing assignments to Analysts and Associates (known to IBD management as “The Staffer” and junior bankers as “That Asshole”) to request staffing on a new project before he runs out the door at 7:37 pm to catch the booze car back to Darien. This is when the put upon Staffer tries to snare an elusive Associate or Analyst before she sees him coming and stick her with a new assignment. (The role of Staffer is the poisoned chalice of Vice President-hood in my business.)

And given that my business, as I have attempted on many an occasion to pound gently but relentlessly into your Well-Meaning and Charming Little Heads, is a client service business, the temptation, thrust, and almost universal practice for anything we do is to do it as soon as possible. After all, if we don’t spread the S&P 500 into Swedish kroner for the client by tomorrow morning, those fuckers at Morgan Stanley certainly will. That means overnight, and that means little Suzy and Billy are going to forgo getting laid for the sixth Friday in a row so their Managing Director can deliver an LBO analysis to the Corporate Treasurer of Google on Saturday which he will not read until Tuesday at the earliest, if he even remembers to take it home. This is what is known colloquially among the denizens of investment banking bullpens as “Living the Dream.”

* * *
So, to a perceptive observer, the life of a junior investment banker in corporate finance or M&A looks pretty lopsided:⁴ lots of interruptions, busy work, and futzing around during normal working hours, and hard, sustained project work overnight and during weekends. It is certainly different from that of their peers in capital markets, who typically work very intensely from 7 am to 7 pm Monday to Friday, then go home and relax or party with friends and family on nights and weekends. From the perspective of a capital markets banker (I was one, briefly, many moons ago), it seems like corp fin and M&A bankers dick around at very low intensity most of the day. They rarely notice the latter only turn on the afterburners after they and pikers like me go home.

And, speaking as a former junior banker myself, I must say working overnight and on weekends, while often a pain in the ass, could actually be pretty pleasant. On weekends in particular, you could roll in after noon, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt if you wanted, and put in three to twelve hours of solid, uninterrupted work on the presentations and models you had in your inbox before you left to down some beers or equivalent with your non-working pals. Being able to focus intently on a difficult model or a tricky presentation without some asshole Managing Director or Vice President breathing down your neck or regaling you with some dipshit story about the strippers he had in his Hamptons hot tub last weekend could be pretty sweet. Given that you’re going to grind through the work anyway, it’s nice to be able to do it without constant interruption.

Of course, there is another very real, very important reason lots of work gets done in investment banks during weekends. It is the obvious, best time to consummate mergers and acquisitions, when public markets are closed and the last minute scrambling on deals can’t kick up disruptive rumors or market movements.

There are lots of reasons i-bankers work on weekends. One of them will be recognizable to the meanest intelligence: Merger Mondays.
— Epicurean Dealmaker (@EpicureanDeal) January 13, 2014

That, plus the complications introduced by the frequent occurrence of clients having the audacity to conduct their deal business in different time zones:

"Sorry, Suntory, we have to knock off work on your $14 bn merger until Sunday morning, US time. Little Joey wants to get laid tonight."
— Epicurean Dealmaker (@EpicureanDeal) January 13, 2014

Which is why, at the end of the day, Your Contumacious Correspondent thinks the no- or limited weekend policies Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, and Credit Suisse are foisting upon their minions are so stupid. They certainly won’t stop clients making insane demands (or, what is the same thing, Managing Directors agreeing to or even suggesting such demands in order to curry favor). They certainly won’t change the ineluctable dynamic that meetings and phone calls during the day not only prevent much productive work from being done but also create new work to be delivered tomorrow. They absolutely won’t make Managing Directors refuse to take a client phone call or host a meeting to close a deal just so they can give a new assignment to some 23-year-old before 5 pm. All they will do, if everybody observes them to the letter, will be to push work that could be otherwise done productively and relatively painlessly over the weekend into the lobster shift on weeknights. That sounds like a pretty shitty tradeoff for twenty somethings in my book.

* * *
Of course, nobody who has any drive, ambition, or cleverness is going to pay the least fucking attention to these nonsense rules. The Analysts and Associates who find ways around them, and who deliver high quality work when it is requested and needed—not when some never-been-a-banker HR weenie says it should be—will be noted, cultivated, and rewarded disproportionately by their superiors. The clock watchers and slackers who religiously follow the weekend work prohibitions will be isolated, paid badly, and given lukewarm recommendations. The only possible good outcome they will have is being able to lie about being one of the rule-breaking, 100+-hour-working Wall Street badasses to impress their Zynga and Snapchat interviewers after they get constructively fired from the Street. Given how justice seems to operate in the world, such clowns will probably end up internet multimillionaires anyway.

Nobody ever said Wall Street was fair.

Related reading:
The Invention of Leisure (November 12, 2013)
In the Nation’s Service (December 29, 2011)
Come Fly With Me (February 12, 2011)


¹ As usual, I speak of junior bankers on my side of the house—corporate finance and M&A—who actually do work insane hours on a regular basis. While the novice denizens of the sales and trading side of the house also work hard, although differently (see supra), none of them regularly clock 80, 90, or even 100+ hour weeks in pursuit of the almighty shekel. The sales and trading floor is almost always emptier than a western movie set at high noon and quieter than a tomb after 7:00 pm on weekdays and anytime on the weekends. If anyone other than skeleton staff passing trading books from their time zone to traders in another is actually at their desk during those times, you can damn well bet Risk Management and Compliance would like to know why.
² I have picked up and made my own a phrase which a senior banker once offered me in centuries past: “You could fire a cannon through the bullpen before 9:30 am on a weekday without fear of hitting anybody.” Interestingly, senior bankers like him (and now me) often try to get into the office much earlier on non-travel days—like 7:30 or 8 o’clock—because we can get more work and planning done before our clients start calling and our assistants start pestering us for three-week-old expense reports.
³ The argument that junior bankers’ hours have no functional utility but rather are simply of a kind with the widespread hazing rituals many social organizations impose on their initiates is spurious itself for three major reasons. First, it ignores the why of the tradition, which I have laid out at length above and elsewhere, in favor of the how. This simply begs the question. Second, as at least one commenter to the linked piece notes, if hazing investment banking juniors is supposed to make them unthinkingly loyal to the bank and industry which does it, it is remarkably ineffective. Junior bankers do wear their trials, real and imagined, as a badge of pride, but it conveys no loyalty to the bastards or firm who did it to them. It is an undeniable fact that bankers of any seniority will jump to another firm at the drop of a hat (or large signing bonus). If anything, the hazing of junior Analysts and Associates weakens and destroys the reflexive loyalty and gratitude to their employer most of the innocent young lambs bring to their jobs when they are first let in the magic door. Lastly, the hazing we do does little to degrade the moral compass of our young charges. At most it just makes them more cynical about large bureaucratic organizations and disillusioned about the charms of my profession. Rare is the first or second year Analyst or Associate who has to make a decision with the least moral content whatsoever; they just have to decide at 3:00 am whether to do the 30 page Excel model or the 60 page Powerpoint presentation first.
⁴ Of course, you can see a couple of things worth noting if you have been paying attention. First, the 80, 90, or 100+ hour workweeks are never planned. They arise organically out of the junior banker’s project load, normally because two or more of her assignments go live and active at the same time. There is nothing to do but gut it out when that happens, and that means working 16 or more hours a day and going home at 6:00 am to shower, change, and return to the office. Second, these stupid work limitation rules are really only coming into effect now because most corporate finance and M&A bankers don’t have enough productive, money-making work to do in the first place. As soon as the market turns, you will see these rules die an ignoble and unremarked death.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

The Invention of Leisure

“Get a job.”

— Famous chorus from a popular song

O Dearest and Most Beloved of All Indiscriminate Internet Content Consumers (that’s you), I fear Your Humble and Most Retiring of All Econoblogosophists (that’s me) has some terrible news to impart:

Goldman Sachs has finally and irrevocably jumped the shark.

And no, I reluctantly interrupt your quiet enjoyment of reality television this sad evening not because the favorite whipping boy of every published journalist and his or her small dog has decided to stop ripping the faces off muppets, repackaging toxic waste for sale to blind widows and orphans on life support, or kicking German Landesbanken in the testicles for the sheer joy of listening to them shriek in agony. No, in each of these respects I believe the Ur-Squid of the Western Capitalist World is still now as it ever was: unrestrained, unrepentant, and not just a little bit naughty.

No, whereof I speak (although Lloyd would rather I were silent) is the horrible, earth-shattering, mind-boggling reality that Goldman Sachs—evil poster cephalopod of tendentious, horse-semen-throwing pseudo-Marxist demagogues pontificating from the decaying soap boxes of musico-cultural mouthpieces long past their prime, relevance, and peak circulation levels¹—has apparently decided to treat its junior professional employees like human beings.

I know, I know. I will pause here a moment to let you collect your dentures from the floor.

* * *

The sad and shocking truth is that Goldman Sachs has apparently decided to require its cannon fodder (excuse me) valued junior professionals² to do something so shocking, so transgressive to the norms of civilized society in the concrete canyons of Wall Street and the City of London that I am loath to describe it here without due warning: take Friday nights and Saturdays off. There is other nonsense associated with this new policy, which admits of few or no exceptions, like uninterrupted week-long vacations for Analysts and Associates and a prohibition against gaming artificial weekend idleness by telecommuting via Blackberry, smartphone, or laptop, but I will not sport with your intelligence by elaborating upon it. The material point is these clowns seem hell-bent upon preventing their junior investment bankers from engaging in one of the few, hallowed activities which has differentiated them from their slacker cousins and co-graduates of elite universities who have traditionally enjoyed their weekends fresh out of school by trying not to contract virulent STDs or end up on a slab in the county morgue deceased of alcohol poisoning. Namely, work.³

I can only say: Lloyd. Gary. WTF?

There has been some attempt from certain quarters of the blogosphere to understand the rationale behind this ludicrous pandering to all that is unholy in Human Resources political correctness, and the consensus seems to be that Goldman is taking this ill-advised step reluctantly, in order to compete for its fresh meat valued junior resources with other, currently more glamorous employers like social media companies and other purveyors of popular masturbatory aids. As part and parcel of this facile narrative there is copious pointing toward the alleged demand for and attraction to the “best and brightest” of our youth by said employers. Since Goldman Sachs is purportedly in direct competition with such archetypes of socioeconomic desirability as Google, Facebook, and Twitter for the most intelligent, ambitious, and driven of the flower of our culture’s young people, of course (the argument goes) they must relax the traditional salt mine labor characteristics of entry level investment banking jobs in favor of “work-life balance” and uninterrupted cocaine benders on Friday and Saturday nights.

But this is stupid on many levels.

* * *

For one, as I have stated unequivocally before, investment banking neither seeks out nor requires the allegedly “best and brightest”—whoever the fuck they are supposed to be—for its employees. All we seek are aggressive, ambitious, smart enough young kids to process our ridiculous pitch books, update our standardized models, and generally take our shit while we senior bankers do whatever is necessary to bring in enough revenues to ensure our continued employment and the consequent support of our dependent wives, children, mistresses, and bartenders. For another, the majority of youngsters who are attracted to investment banking are, contrary to the general prejudice of investment banking critics everywhere, surprisingly risk averse and non-entrepreneurial in nature. The tender young shoot who aspires to Lloyd Blankfein’s beard and pay package is almost never the same sort of soul who wishes he or she were staging a Lord of the Rings-themed wedding in the Pacific Northwest woods on the back of technology company stock options. They hold completely different life ambitions. This can be seen by the perhaps surprising absence of former investment bankers among the massively rich and successful entrepreneurs of the world.⁴

Finally, the implicit coddling and tender concern for the delicate sensibilities of young investment bankers’ boy- and girlfriends which are encoded in Goldman’s new policy are completely and irrevocably at odds with the core premise of my industry, which is uncompromising customer service. The entire fucking point of working 24 hours a day, for days on end, and canceling weeknight dates with Kate Upton, Las Vegas bachelor parties with George Clooney and Brad Pitt, and Christmas holidays with the Pope of all Christendom at the last possible minute is that the entire investment bank works at the pleasure and whim of clients who pay us a small fortune to do so. That is why successful senior bankers never tell the client no. That is why we agree to impossible deadlines for ridiculous requests at the last minute. Why we therefore ruin our junior bankers’ lives with all-night and all-weekend work on a regular basis. Because that is the fucking job.

So telling some pissant college graduate or wet-behind-the-ears MBA she can futz off and take in a Broadway show, art gallery opening, or all-night drinking session in the East Village or West End from Friday night through Sunday morning does that person absolutely no good whatsoever. Because it is telling her, incorrectly, that she should expect clients and bosses to respect the life-work boundaries of normal human beings in her life too. But none of these ever will, and if she wants and expects to make a success of herself in my industry, she better reconcile herself to that fact as soon as fucking possible.

* * *

I am old enough, O Dearly Beloved, to remember the last time big investment banks tried to pander to junior professionals, during the first dot com boom of the late 1990s. Then we tried fruit baskets, casual Fridays every day, and in-house concierges to pick up and deliver dry cleaning, Broadway tickets, and other bullshit in a desperate and ultimately fruitless attempt to prevent our most ambitious young Turks from joining such guaranteed future world beaters as Webvan or Pets.com. None of it worked, since the true entrepreneurs (or reckless idiots) among our ranks lit out for the coast anyway, and the risk-averse remnants who stayed behind got utterly ruined by our coddling. For believe you me, when the dot com boom imploded, the work-life balance perks and privileges disappeared on Wall Street faster than you can say “Bernie Ebbers.” And the poor young knuckleheads who had embraced the kinder, gentler Wall Street as their birthright could not adjust to the harsh light of workaday reality. It is no exaggeration to say an entire generation of potential investment bankers was ruined by such nonsense.

But that is the nature of large scale corporate investment banking nowadays. Human Resources weasels rule the roost in times of weakened revenue generation and secular decline, and the Executive Committee is more than happy to throw a sop to the political correctness police who claim such nonsense is the only way Goldman Sachs will ever hire another person from Princeton University or Harvard Business School ever again. It doesn’t really cost anything, and it is an easy way to separate the oh-I’m-only-here-for-the-resume-building chaff from the yes-I-really-want-to-be-an-investment-banker wheat.

I’d suggest the junior bankers of Goldman Sachs and elsewhere keep that in mind as they adjust to this brave new world of investment banking with a human face. For in my industry, it is wise to remember that it is always the human beings who are taken out behind the woodshed and shot first.

Related reading:
Molon Labe (September 1, 2008)
If the Phone Don’t Ring, You’ll Know It’s Me (October 1, 2011)
In the Nation’s Service (December 29, 2011)


¹ Yeah, he’s a dick. A talented dick, but a dick nonetheless.
²By which corporate bureaucratese is meant the wet-behind-the-ears tyros who join investment banks straight out of college (known, grandiloquently, as “Financial Analysts”) or business school (known, similarly, as “Associates”) to provide the blood, lymphatic fluid, and gristle which lubricate the grindstones of a large, multinational investment bank such as Goldman Sachs. Note that the moniker “professionals” is applied only to those naïfs who join an investment bank with some pretense or ambition of making widow and orphan cheating their long-term career, rather than the far more numerous, better-treated, and far less dispensable folks known as “support staff” who actually make the world go around.
³ I speak throughout, by the way, as is my wont, of the junior professionals who work in the corporate finance and M&A arms of investment banks, not the knuckle-dragging denizens of the sales and trading floors. For only the former tend to be on call at the whim of the clients of their investment bank 24/7, whereas the latter knock off at reasonable hours on Friday evenings and only return, bleary eyed and hungover, early Monday morning, to devour onion cheeseburgers and rip off hapless portfolio managers of Landesbanken. Perhaps it is revealing that Lloyd Blankfein and Gary Cohn come from the sales and trading side of Goldman Sachs and hence have little understanding, respect, or appreciation for the traditional work hours of their corporate finance colleagues which they have so unwisely attempted to curtail.
⁴ Counterexamples, like Mike Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos, prove my point. They worked at investment banks, but they were not investment bankers. They were technology geeks. Staffers. Q.E.D.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

I, Fembot

“I think personality is much more important than intelligence, don’t you?”

— Bicentennial Man

I confess freely to you, O Dearest and Most Patient of Understanding Readers, that I have read Margo Epprecht’s Quartz piece “The real reason women are leaving Wall Street” front to back at least three times, and I still cannot discover a coherent answer therein to the article’s title. It is well enough written, with plenty of quotes from concerned characters and an adequate admixture of data and trend analysis to illustrate its principal empirical point: that notwithstanding a constant flow of women entering the industry over the past several decades and achieving some measure of success, it does not seem that many (enough?) stay. Nevertheless, I do not think it is confessing my own lack of sympathy or attention to assert that one searching for reasons for such a situation or even the author’s conclusions in this regard might remain just as nonplussed as I am.

There are allusions to Wall Street’s “hierarchical world” and “a specific culture of men” (whatever the hell that psychological gem, unelaborated and unexplained in the text, is supposed to mean). Ms Epprecht also points to the apotheosis of risk-taking over the past two decades, which, given the accompanying assertion that women shun risk more than their testosterone-addled colleagues, I suppose is intended to be dispositive. Anecdotes are offered of successful women on Wall Street who achieved high rank, power, and good industry reputation only to find, in vague ways left undescribed, that their achievement felt hollow, and the industry just didn’t offer the rewards they were looking for in exchange for their hard work and sacrifice.

Now, Mrs. Dealmaker Mère didn’t raise no fools. Having spent enough decades on this planet to be much closer than many of you to my AARP card, I am well aware that trying to determine what that mythopoetic, monolithic assemblage entitled “Women” wants is not only a mug’s game, guaranteed to relegate one to sleeping in a real or metaphorical doghouse for a week, but also empirically and epistemologically unsound. There is a huge range of capacity, preference, and personality among women—just as there is among men—and even without the personal examples known to me of women who are tougher, more aggressive, and bigger risk takers than the vast majority of men ever could be, I am certain there are more than enough women who would not only thrive but enjoy Wall Street culture without a second thought. By the same token, there must be plenty of smart, driven, and ambitious women who would look under the festering rock that is my industry and dismiss it completely with a judicious and decisive “Eww.” Frankly, the examples Ms Epprecht cites in her article support my prior point. The women she mentions are no cupcakes.

And investment banking is not a giant industry. Surely there are enough ambitious, tough-as-nails women who like money and social prestige sprinkled among the fairer sex to populate the cubicles and corner offices of Wall Street. Women who are not averse to sacrificing family, friends, and relationships—and the bulk of their normal childbearing years¹—for the brass ring at Goldman or Morgan Stanley. Or maybe not. Maybe Wall Street gets all the women who can and want to fit into this culture already. Maybe the suitable portion of the distaff distribution just isn’t that big. Maybe smart, ambitious women have more real or perceived choices than men do, and they realize that investment banking is a tough, uncompromising way to spend your youth and health in exchange for a promise you will make it to the top which is just too uncertain. There is a perspective on my industry that, far from being Elysium, it is actually a pernicious and deadly trap which draws its victims in with unsupportable visions of endless riches and power only to chain them to a gold-plated galley oar. A devotee of this perspective might therefore look upon the relative dearth of women in investment banking and declare, “You go, girl. Smart move.” Perhaps the shortage of women on Wall Street is a good thing, and a marker of their superior judgment and perception.

I will let you decide. Given that this is a discussion about women and Wall Street, I suspect you already have a firmly held opinion.

* * *

Be that as it may, however, I would like to share a couple tidbits of advice inspired by Ms Epprecht’s article for any sharp-toothed woman currently plotting her way to the top of the Wall Street heap.

First, a perceptive reader will notice that many of Ms Epprecht’s examples—including herself, naturally—are of women who made their names and careers on the research side of investment banks. This is true even of the Poster Girl for Women on Wall Street, Sallie Krawcheck, who many fail to remember made her name as a highly respected bank analyst at Sanford Bernstein before Sandy Weill poached her to run Citigroup’s Smith Barney unit after Elliot Spitzer blew up Wall Street’s long-running game of using research analysts to promote clients’ stocks and new underwriting. This is particularly ironic, because the big boom in Wall Street sell-side equity research in the 1980s and 1990s which Ms Epprecht cites as a trend supporting the influx of women was driven by banks’ relentless promotion of equities to retail and institutional investors. The Eighties and Nineties were the zenith of Equity Research on the Street: analysts were never held in higher regard nor better paid than when they were used as the sharp end of the spear for distributing stocks. Analysts like Jack Grubman and Mary Meeker were rock stars, paid just like the investment bankers they helped to win underwriting assignments, and even better known.

But this, as you know, struck many in retrospect (like Mr. Spitzer) as an unacceptable conflict of interest, and the settlement he forced on Wall Street demoted research analysts from front line revenue producers back to the second class citizens they used to be. Once investment banks could no longer use nor pay analysts for winning lucrative business, they stopped paying and promoting them like investment bankers, and their numbers, pay, and prominence dwindled. Add the rise of hedge funds (who tend to disregard sell-side research completely) in the Aughts as Wall Street’s biggest and most lucrative trading partners—displacing large institutional investors like pension funds and mutual fund complexes—and the retreat of individual investors from meaningful participation in the equity market, and equity research departments transformed from profit centers and sales arms back into cost centers. And if there is one place in a sales- and profit-driven institution like an investment bank where the Board and Executive Committee do not look for senior executives, it is in staff divisions and cost centers.² Sallie Krawcheck, ironically enough, made the leap to senior executive management just as (and largely because) the career platform she had risen to prominence on collapsed beneath her.

The rise and fall of female-friendly research departments as profit centers alone might explain the relative paucity of women among top executive ranks in investment banking. This plus the empirical tendency of women in finance to be attracted to other staff departments like legal, compliance, human resources, and information technology, like Ms Epprecht’s other example. Your chances of making it to the executive suite, except as the CFO (the ultimate staff position, held by Krawcheck and Lehman’s Erin Callan, for example) or head of one of the ”softer,” more boring divisions like retail banking or asset management, are materially hurt by building a career in one of your firm’s cost centers rather than a line position in a profit center. Is this fair? Does it make sense? I don’t know, but I guarantee you it is not limited to investment banking.

If you want to make it to the executive suite, don’t try to make yourself “useful” to your firm. Find somewhere where you can make a lot of money.

* * *

Second, the historical success of women in research in the 1980s and 1990s illustrates another point which I feel it is incumbent on me to make here. I will illustrate it with an example provided by Alison Deans (asset management):

As a manager, Deans noticed that one of her best female employees rarely sought her out. The men who reported to her often stopped in to ask about her weekend or to tell stories about business successes. The female employee didn’t take the time to nurture her relationship with her boss. “I realized that I was spending very little time with one of my most effective employees,” relates Deans. “She was so busy getting work done that the only time I saw her was when something got in her way. I started thinking like a male manager: ‘These women are always running in here with their hair on fire and the guys are all good guys.’”

This, in my experience, is all too often how women in my business mishandle the socialization aspect of the job. Ms Deans chose to make a special effort to engage her employee, and the article draws the conclusion that such organizational cultures must be changed to become more inclusive. But let me be blunt: expecting your firm to do this for you is stupid.

If you want to succeed and grow in any business, you have to manage up and sideways as well as down. Doing a great job is simply not enough. Part of succeeding in an organization involves establishing trust, and you cannot do that if you are 100% focused on just doing your job. Ms Deans’ employee was an idiot not to try to engage with her boss on a social level. Call this politics if you will, it is a critical element of career management in any organization: making friends and allies and cultivating networks of friendship, support, and acquaintance. The networking aspect is particularly critical in my business, where building and growing internal and external networks is practically the definition of the job. Research analysts, if they are any good, tend to be good at cultivating external networks among investors and clients, but the job itself—especially now given the new, hermetically isolated regulatory environment—discourages the development of internal networks. Just read Ms Epprecht’s admiring description of Maryann Keller’s workday: it is almost all externally directed.

In fact, equity research is particularly susceptible of supporting the tendency of many women who come to finance to focus on their jobs to the detriment of their careers. Schmoozing, shooting the shit, going to Chipotle with your group for lunch, discussing movies or TV shows or sporting events in the office at 3:00 am while you wait for Presentation Resources to turn that massive underwriting pitch are all indispensable parts of your job, if you want to make it anything but a short-term stint on the way to another industry. Women are not alone in making the mistake of ignoring these career management rules, but in my limited anecdotal experience a much higher percentage of female than male investment bankers tend to be highly intelligent, hyper-serious, relentlessly efficient robots. Perhaps they feel it necessary to behave this way in order to be taken seriously, I don’t know. In many respects they are better potential bankers than the middling-intelligent frat boys, lacrosse players, and oarsmen we seem to default to hiring. But those men often have far better political savvy, and they are naturals at swimming in the high pressure team environment that my business depends on. Nobody wants to work with (or for) a loner.

So keep this advice in mind, my would-be female colleagues and peers: Don’t be a fembot.

It may make you particularly effective at your job, but it also makes you that much easier to unplug.

Related reading:
Margo Epprecht, The real reason women are leaving Wall Street (Quartz, September 5, 2013)
Fingernails that Shine Like Justice (May 21, 2007)
Can’t Buy Me Love (April 29, 2012)
She’s Trading Her MG for a White Chrysler LeBaron (March 2, 2013)


¹ I cite myself:

Another answer may be that the duration, timing, and demands of an investment banking career are simply incompatible with many women’s other important interests. In particular, while an analyst typically has a two- or three-year stint directly after college, after which most are encouraged to leave and get an MBA (and some elect to make the jump into private equity or hedge funds), a woman entering investment banking as an associate after business school can anticipate at least a decade before she can begin to exercise some measure of control over her life. Associates usually start in their mid- to late twenties, spend three to five years before promotion to Vice President, and then spend four to seven years or more getting to Managing Director. All during that time, they work incredibly long hours, travel like maniacs, and basically do not have any personal life to speak of. For many women, this span from their mid-twenties to their mid-thirties coincides with what they envision as the period when they will get married and start a family. While this is true for many men, also, I think most of us can agree that committing to a career in investment banking is a much more fraught and difficult decision for a woman than it is for a man. This stage is also one when junior bankers are not making enough money to make it feasible to hire full time help to care for young children. A female Vice President is certainly physically capable of having a baby while traveling 150 days a year and working upwards of 80 hours per week, but unless her spouse or partner is rolling in dough him- or herself (or willing to stay at home), she simply will not be able to afford to outsource its care.

² The rare exceptions, like Sandy Weill’s designation of in-house lawyer Chuck Prince as his successor at Citigroup, demonstrate the wisdom of this practice. Sales-driven organizations look for leadership among their moneymakers.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Mr. Indispensable

“The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”

— Attributed to several indispensable men

Fire Jamie Dimon.

There, that got your attention, didn’t it?

Seriously, folks, the brouhaha surrounding the upcoming nonbinding shareholder vote to separate the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer roles at J.P. Morgan is getting a bit silly. People are marshaling all sorts of weak, irrelevant, and disingenuous reasons on both sides to argue for and against the resolution. Hence we get ludicrous examples of access journalists asking a gaggle of powerful white men whether another powerful white man should lose his power. Gee, I wonder how that turned out, don’t you?

I will not bore you with a demolition of the flyweight reasons the pros are using, including envy, spite, ad hominem vitriol, and gleeful detestation of Mr. Dimon as an avatar of hated “banksters” everywhere. On the other side, however, the cons have assembled all sorts of arguments against stripping Mr. Dimon of his Chairmanship which woefully fail to address the central point of the exercise, which is good corporate governance. Some say Jamie shepherded the House of Morgan through the dark days of the financial crisis with nary a scratch, and hence should be rewarded by keeping his seat at the head of the boardroom table. Yes he did, and a boffo job at that. So what? I got really good scores on my SATs. Did that mean I didn’t have to take tests or submit papers in college? Of course not: the past is the past. Besides, J.P. Morgan sailed into the Panic of 2008 in the best shape of any of its peers, with the possible exception of much smaller Goldman Sachs, which also came out smelling like a (relative) rose. It’s not like Jamie excavated a pile of shit and turned it into gold. He started with a pile of gold and mostly kept the tarnish off. No superhero he.

Some say the evidence of outperformance by companies with bifurcated Chairman/CEO roles is lacking. Part of that is due to the all-too notable reluctance of powerful men to give up power (viz. supra), which has led to a remarkable paucity of such structures among large publicly-traded corporations. Hence, the sample set from which one can draw financial performance data is unhelpfully small. Even so, this is a remarkably lame argument, equivalent to the contention that the fact that most people who wear seatbelts never get into accidents (and, contrariwise, wearing a seatbelt does not prevent accidents) means that seatbelts are useless. Go ahead and pull the other one.

Still other FOJs contend Mr. Dimon’s delivery of $21 billion in record profits last year should silence his critics and put the kibosh on this petty attempt to strip him of rightful powers and duties. But I say the man or woman at the helm of a $2.4 trillion colossus which employs over a quarter of a million people around the globe damn well better produce some pretty amazing results, especially when so many of its largest competitors remain in disarray, the cost of funds for financial firms could not be cheaper if Ben Bernanke were backing up a dump truck full of dead presidents into J.P. Morgan’s lobby, and his privately held bank is implicitly backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government (and perhaps the European Union, too).¹ The man is a CEO. He is supposed to create good results with the awe inspiring assets he has at his disposal. He did. Big whoop. Give the man a fucking fruitcake.²

* * *

But all this is smoke and mirrors.

The entire point of separating the roles of Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer is that they have different responsibilities and duties. They are different jobs. Now, perhaps at smaller companies with simple business models and uncomplicated objectives (grow revenues fast enough to meet payroll and pay the bank on time), there is no practical need to separate them. But the bigger a company gets—and I think we can all agree J.P. Morgan is about as big as a firm can get—the breadth and scope of duties each role properly possesses expands dramatically. The CEO is supposed to be the chief employee, leading his or her organization to deliver on the agenda and objectives the Board of Directors has set. The CEO is an operating executive.

The Chairman, on the other hand, is supposed to lead the Board of Directors in setting the agenda, strategy, and objectives of the corporation, in response to its employers, the shareholders, and all the other myriad stakeholders (employees, regulators, government officials, vendors, community members, and customers) which have a say or a stake in the activity of the firm. The Chairman and other directors of the corporation are stewards. They are not supposed to get down in the weeds, day to day, operating the various parts of the business. That is the CEO’s job. But as stewards they are supposed to think about the what-ifs, the perils and opportunities that may or may not confront the firm in the future, and the problems and threats which may be festering beneath the glittering surface of excellent corporate performance. A properly engaged CEO doesn’t have time to worry about such matters. He has a day job to perform.

The other key duty of the Board, with the Chairman at its head, is oversight. The Board is supposed to monitor the performance of the CEO and his or her key executives: guide, correct, discipline, and incentivize him or her to perform in a way which achieves the objectives they have set and satisfies the other constraints the firm must operate under. Even the meanest intelligence can see that having the Chairman and CEO of a firm be the same person collapses this crucial function into irrelevance:

“Gee, Jamie, do you think you’re performing adequately in the public relations part of your job?”
“Why, yes, Jamie, I think I’m doing a great job, don’t you?”
“Sure I do! Have a cigar.”

Of course, a soi-disant superman CEO could surely set his own agenda and monitor his own performance—just as his lesser peers can certainly contribute their valuable perspectives on such matters to their Boards—but such arrangements diminish the patently obvious benefit of involving more than one person’s perspective in the issue. Not to mention short-circuiting the potential for meaningful criticism and disagreement over firm challenges, issues, and threats which merit serious discussion. I don’t care how big your head is, two heads (or more) are always better than one.

The role of the Board as stewards of the firm and monitors of the CEO and his or her executive team naturally introduces a healthy tension into the governance of a large organization. A Board which is properly performing these duties will have occasion to challenge, correct, punish, reward, and occasionally fire a CEO. Find me a person who could legitimately do this to him or herself and I will show you a person who is temperamentally unsuited to the role of CEO. They just don’t make psychopaths that way.

* * *

So much for principle and common sense.

The real reason to strip Jamie Dimon of his Chairmanship is that he has done a shitty job at it. He has failed to accomplish one of the most important, difficult, and basic tasks a Chairman is supposed to do: establish a succession plan for the CEO. Each and every Board worth its perks and compensation should make finding and grooming successors to the firm’s current senior executives—especially the CEO—its most important agenda item. Not only has Jamie failed at this, he has actively fired key lieutenants and potential successors like Bill Winters and Steve Black, apparently on the basis that they posed too credible a threat to his own power.

The fact that certain people find Jamie’s petulant whining that he may quit if shareholders vote to strip him of the Chairman role a credible threat is proof positive that the current Chairman of J.P. Morgan has done a lousy job preparing for the inevitable eventuality that Dimon will have to be replaced. The current Chairman has also done a lousy job cajoling the current CEO to delegate more of the minutiae of running a place as gigantic and complex as J.P. Morgan to trusted lieutenants, and to train and mentor those lieutenants into a position where they can ultimately replace him. That these are related issues, and practices which strike at the very heart of the purported indispensability of any Chief Executive Officer, is highly revealing.

Finally, the current Chairman has done a lousy job selecting his other Board members, particularly in the all-important area of audit and risk management. The risk oversight and monitoring function at a gigantic, staggeringly complex lending and trading bank like J.P. Morgan is arguably the most important one—after CEO succession—a Board has. Yet Jamie stacked his risk committee with a former lawyer and professional board member previously on the risk committee at AIG who currently heads a natural history museum, a rich kid whose life experience consists of managing grandad’s money, and the CEO of a a flight controls company. I will wander way out on a limb here and bet these people couldn’t evaluate the financial risks of a childrens’ lemonade stand, much less one of the largest banks on the planet.

The current Chairman of J.P. Morgan has done a crappy job in almost every dimension that can be measured. And don’t point me to his lead director Tweety Bird, either. I don’t care how fearsome Lee Raymond’s reputation as a former imperial Chairman and CEO was, it is clear he can’t get Jamie Dimon to return his phone calls, much less address the critical areas of underperformance I have identified.

The agenda is clear: the current Chairman of J.P. Morgan should be run out of town on a rail. The current CEO can stay, assuming a new, effective, powerful Chairman thinks he’s up to snuff. Clearly somebody needs to smack that knucklehead around a little.

Fortunately, Jamie, you will be relieved to hear I am not available.

Related reading:
To Catch a Thief (February 13, 2009)
J.P. Morgan and the Marlboro Man (May 20, 2012)


¹ Want to deny this? Envision, if you can, whether the US government would let anything happen to all of $2.4 trillion, 256,000 people strong J.P. Morgan if it got into serious trouble. Do you for a minute think they would let it crater like Lehman Brothers? That they would even consider it? I didn’t think so.
² Or, say, $20 million.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

In Praise of Jargon

CHAKOBSA: the so-called “magnetic language” derived in part from the ancient Bhotani (Bhotani Jib—Jib meaning dialect). A collection of ancient dialects modified by needs of secrecy, but chiefly the hunting language of the Bhotani, the hired assassins of the first Wars of Assassins.

— Frank Herbert, Dune

Normally, O Dearly Beloved, I am a fan of author and commentator Steven Poole’s witty takedowns of the silly, pretentious behavior humans get up to on occasion. I think I discovered him in medias res, skinning, gutting, and flambéing the “foodie” culture while it yet lived, and the amusing screams of pain and outrage emanating from his victims still echo satisfyingly in this non-foodie’s ears.

But his latest screed on what he calls “management-speak”—the jargon common to corporate businesses and their environs—falls rather more clangingly and less persuasively from his pen. In fact, it comes across rather like Mr. Poole and his pals from the Drones Explorers Club just burst through the forest wall into some Papua New Guinea clearing in 1920 and are pointing and jeering at the bewildered natives in ceremonial costumes:

“My God, Bertie, that chap has painted his entire body with mud! And the Missus isn’t wearing any clothes! Ahahahahaha!!”

It is perhaps fortunate that the corporate world is widely understood to hold a position of social and economic power, else Mr. Poole’s little exercise in cross-cultural satire might get slapped with a libel suit and be investigated for evidence of a hate crime against the underprivileged.

For it is blindingly clear that not only does Mr. Poole beg the question of the purportedly stultifying and spirit-sapping nature of management-speak—stipulating it as true rather than demonstrating it—but also that he has a remarkably ill-informed grasp of the jargon he criticizes, a desperately poor understanding of the way such language is used, and a surprisingly tin ear to boot. If I were a less charitable man, I might suggest that Mr. Poole is a culturally blinkered scrivener who has never set foot inside an actual business meeting or participated in business communication beyond giggling at press releases¹ and watching satiric corporate soap operas on the BBC. If I really wanted to score points, I might accuse him of flogging sloppy, tendentious nonsense designed to provoke the anti-business and anti-elitist prejudices of a certain class of fellow Brits so they will go out and buy his new book. But I wouldn’t want to be accused of being culturally insensitive to the species Homo authoriensis, so I won’t even mention it.

* * *

So, in the spirit of cross-cultural understanding, let me reach my hand across the gaping divide between those who work for a living and those who cannot understand why they have to to proffer a little gentle education. Mr. Poole’s list of the ten worst offenders among management-speak will stand as a serviceable roadmap for my purposes.

1. Going forward
Yes, this phrase does indeed stand in for “from now on” or “in future,”² as Mr. Poole suggests. But while he catches its rhetorical intent—which by the way is common to much management-speak and business jargon—he is too busy alleging progress can never be made in business to notice the source of its rhetorical power. For, unlike the anodyne, directionless vagueness of “in future,” going forward implies motion, action, and, most importantly, direction. There’s a reason the preferred coinage is not “going backward.” While I do not mean to freight this modest phrase with unwarranted profundity, the idea of purposeful action and progress is central to most management and business communications, for even the dullest businessperson realizes the biggest risk in any large organization is inertia. “In future” implies no imperative. “Going forward” does.

2. Drill down
I hope Mr. Poole’s other writing is not as drab and inventionless as his literal equation of “drill down” with “look at in detail” implies. If so, I’d probably find reading Her Majesty’s Government’s telephone directory more thrilling. Drill down is a wonderful metaphor, incorporating geological and investigatory overtones of impressive metaphorical power. Drill down implies there are layers to penetrate, mysteries to uncover, complexities to map. Drilling down requires energy, focus, and effort, and drilling attempts to uncover both buried history and the structure under the surface. Drill down is a term of due diligence, where the intent and practice is to gain a deeper understanding of a business or other phenomenon you do not already understand. Drilling down is not what some passive paper pusher with an eye on the clock does; drilling down is what an explorer does. Mr. Poole’s puerile metaphor of drilling as sexual penetration doesn’t even come close. Nobody I know who has used the term has ever used it with such a leer in their voice.

3. Action
I cannot disagree with Mr. Poole that “verbings” are anathema. My personal bête noire is that horrid specimen “to impact.” (As far as I am concerned, only teeth get impacted.) But I would note that verbings are not restricted to business. And, unlike many forms of jargon or specialized argot, verbings do nothing to enrich language with metaphor or rhetorical power, and the real English phrases they replace are not much longer, if at all, so they provide no useful economy or speed of expression. In almost every instance, they are just evidence of linguistic (and mental) laziness. A pox on them, I say.

4. End of play
Not being a native of the Sceptered Isle who learned what bubble and squeak was at Mary Poppins’ knee, I cannot say whether “end of play” is truly a corporate Britishism or merely a phrase Mr. Poole misheard from his friend in the steno pool at British Land. In any event, it sounds much more to me like a phrase from sport, which, if Mr. Poole had ever spent time in a corporate environment, he would recognize as one of the prevailing metaphors of business. While I myself am skeptical that sport provides useful or revealing metaphors for business, I find it odd to associate it with childhood or “infantilized workers.” Unless Mr. Poole thinks the billions of pounds at stake in the Premier League are somehow childs’ play.

5. Deliver
Honestly, what does Mr. Poole have against delivery? Was his uncle a disgruntled Royal Mail employee? Delivery, while itself being inoffensive to most human beings, carries the useful implication that the person delivering the goods is often not the person responsible for their production, which many times takes place at different places at the hands of different individuals. And yet—as we may surmise by the fact that real individuals, including non-businesspersons, pay real money to postal services and parcel express carriers to deliver items they themselves did not produce to arrive on time and in good condition—the act of delivery itself carries value and merits attention. Finally, as service providers such as Yours Truly occasionally use the term, “deliverables” is a useful abbreviation for all sorts of preliminary, interim, and finished work products (yes, I went there) that are due at specified times in specified sequence in a complex process involving multiple parties over an extended period of time. I would much prefer to use the all-encompassing abbreviation “Deliverables” than an exhaustive laundry list like “Teaser, Non-Disclosure Agreement, Confidential Information Memorandum, Buyers List, Process Letter, Definitive Agreement, and Closing Schedules, if, as, and when appropriate” in everyday communications with an M&A client, for instance. Can you blame me?

6. Issues
How typical for a Brit to identify the generous, inclusive, and expansive term “issues” with “problems.” I remember how revelatory I found it early in my career to discover that many natives of Old Blighty would respond to the proposal of almost any new business idea or process with the prefatory throat clearing, “Ah. The problem is...” It could be the national anthem. Yes, “issues” can be euphemism for problems, but it can also mean consequences, implications, outcomes, preconditions, or almost anything else upon which there might be differing opinions or which should be discussed. Business is complex, business is riven by ineluctable uncertainty, and business is riddled with myriad issues. Not every issue is a problem, but, by its very nature as an issue, every issue must be addressed. This, by the way, is what the quotidian practice of the business world consists of: the identification, discussion, and resolution of issues. “Problems.” Pshaw.

7. Leverage
Yes, I suppose I and my fellow baby seal murderers in the financial profession are responsible for the glamorization of “leverage,” if not directly for its introduction into non-financial contexts. What can I say? Leverage is indeed a powerful concept, based, strangely enough, on the mechanism of the lever (to which Mr. Poole alludes), which the last time I checked my high school physics text meant a hell of a lot more than “use” or “exploit.” Application of a lever—like a corporate capability, say—in certain contexts can generate far more powerful outcomes than the application of brute force. It depends on the context, specifically the presence of a fulcrum. In certain circumstances, certain corporate attributes can be far more effective and powerful than a simple evaluation of their standalone properties might suggest. Of course, in finance the identification of the lever and the fulcrum is simple and comes prepackaged in the capital structure (where the presence of debt enables a much smaller quantity or force of equity to perform much more effectively than by itself). I suspect the identification and exploitation of coherent levers and fulcrums is more problematic outside of finance than in, but is that not why they pay corporate executives the big bucks?

8. Stakeholders
Bleeding heart anti-business lefties should be delighted that businesses at least pay lip service to the notion of stakeholders. The concept really means all those individuals and organizations who have an ongoing stake in the performance and actions of a corporation, including employees, customers, vendors, suppliers, governments, and yes, even security holders. The concept that a firm has obligations to all of its stakeholders is real and serious enough that the gimlet-eyed archons of capitalism on the Delaware Court of Chancery have specifically enjoined corporations to support it and protected them from ravening shareholders and plaintiffs attorneys when they have. “Stakeholders,” of course, replaces the archaic notion that only the interests of equity shareholders—the nominal “owners” of a corporation—matter to the conduct of a firm. It’s a good word, and an important concept. The fact that certain firms use it as a smokescreen for less savory behavior is less a criticism of the neologism than one of bad actors.

9. Competencies
Okay, I concede this one. “Competencies” is just lame.

10. Sunset
Again, Mr. Poole projects a monochrome shadow of a living word on a blackboard and complains the image is flat and uninteresting. Sunsets are slow, gradual, and predictable. Sunset implies that a project will tail off gradually over time, dying a slow and natural death as resources are consumed or withdrawn. Sunsets are not sudden and violent deaths. Only a business tyro would think that every business project either continues full strength or is taken out behind the chemical sheds and shot. Business projects have life cycles. Pace its deplorable construction as a verbing, sunset is a perfectly acceptable and descriptive metaphor for a common business action. We are not all Mother Teresa or the Terminator.

* * *

In fact, Mr. Poole’s jeremiad is in general a deplorable exercise in sneering incomprehension. He seems to have no insight or understanding whatsoever that the metaphors embedded in management-speak are not incidental but rather central to their purpose and continued usefulness. He glances passingly at the notion that they might be primarily rhetorical devices, but then he ignores this key insight for childish cheap shot-taking. His principal objection to the professional argot of an occupation he does not share seems to be that it offends his sense of linguistic and literary propriety.

Sure, like any language—English, for example—management-speak can be used “to deflect blame, complicate simple ideas, obscure problems, and perpetuate power relations.” But that is a function of language. And make no mistake: bureaucratese is its own language. Or, to be more precise, its own idiom. Idioms evolve organically among the members of a group sharing common interests and concerns to better communicate those very interests and concerns. This can take the form of abbreviation, where a commonly understood word or phrase can convey an entire sentence or conversation; motivation, where a word or phrase is understood to inspire action; or community-building, where the word or phrase triggers thoughts and actions of allegiance and commonality among its audience. These all necessarily exclude people outside the in-group, but this does not need to be a sinister thing. Try to follow a conversation among particle physicists in the Cal Tech lunchroom one day if you doubt me.

Human society is complex and highly specialized. It should be no surprise that we have erected our own Tower of Babel of mutually incomprehensible idioms, even within the English language, in order to cope. If nothing else, management-speak and other specialized idioms thrive because they are efficient: they save lots of time which conversationalists would otherwise waste in trivial itemizing and explication of concepts, notions, beliefs, and the like which they already share and understand. Business speak, like many other idioms, shares the additional motivation that it is primarily a rhetorical device, designed to summon and direct the energies of hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands toward the pursuit and execution of common goals which the rest of society does not necessarily share. Its practitioners really don’t care what unwashed outsiders think about it.

Perhaps Mr. Poole fails to understand that management-speak is not directed at him, nor at any other person not invested in the success of the organization which uses it (which probably includes many of the clock-watching wage slaves in its employ). Like the costume of the Papua New Guinean mud man to Bertie Wooster, our argot may appear harsh, awkward, even ridiculous to him, but that is simply because he cannot understand its true import and meaning. Saying business jargon is awkward is like complaining that white lies are untrue: accurate, as far as it goes, but it misses the entire point.

Besides, Steven, we all have our little communications quirks, innit?

Related reading:
Steven Poole, 10 of the worst examples of management-speak (The Guardian, April 25, 2013)
Hail Mary, Full of Grace (May 26, 2011)


¹ An easy and deserving target, I am careful to admit.
² I would not dream of criticizing the eccentric British tendency to drop prepositions and definite articles willy nilly from common phrases for some inexplicable classist motive of their own: “go down [to] the pub,” “in [the] future.” So I will just move on, silently.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

She’s Trading Her MG for a White Chrysler LeBaron

Path dependency is a bitch.

— Unattributed

Diligent readers of these pages will recall I first addressed the relative paucity of women in investment banking (and the related area of private equity) well over five and one-half years ago. I addressed a number of commonly-held arguments why this might be so, and I rejected most of them for the assertion, based upon my own experience and perception, that there are few women in my industry because most women are simply not interested enough in becoming or remaining an investment banker. Acknowledged in my argument were the indisputable facts (to me, at least) that a) those women who did stay and make careers in corporate finance or M&A were at least as tough, competent, and successful as their male peers and b) the often impossibly demanding nature of the job made me wonder why anyone of any gender would want to stay in it if they did not have to.

I also pointed out that the mostly American investment banks I’ve belonged to have made sustained and (in their eyes) heroic efforts to redress this imbalance ever since the mid-1990s, if not before. While sustained attention and encouragement to boosting the hiring of women and other minorities¹ did increase their uptake of female university and business school graduates into entry-level analyst and associate classes, it seemed most banks simply could not hang onto the women they hired. Additional measures were taken, including outreach through corporate and extra-corporate affiliation groups like 85 Broads, more aggressive recruiting on business school and college campuses, and internal sensitivity programs geared toward eliminating sexist and other discriminatory behavior as well as dampening down the traditional frat house atmosphere common in many parts of banking, especially the trading floors. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, none of these measures seems to have had much success. In fact, there seems to be approximately the same number of women in investment banking now that there was at the beginning of the 1990s, before the industry itself began to swell like a tick on a dog and (related, maybe?) investment banks began to realize they better increase the diversity of their professionals.²

Now we have actual data out of the United Kingdom which confirm the lack of progress in this area:

For every woman in a UK Financial Services Authority controlled function at a top global bank operating in the City of London there are, on average, five men in similar positions, according to Financial News analysis. FN looked at the gender split at the top-10 banks operating in the UK, based on the Thomson Reuters league table for global investment banking fees in 2012. This group comprised JP Morgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, UBS and Wells Fargo.

A few things are worth noting about this report. First, while the bankers being tallied all work and/or are registered in the UK, virtually every bank on the list is domiciled in America or Europe. Only little old Barclays, after its ingestion of Lehman Brothers in the U.S., flies the Union Jack for Britain. So, while we might guess some of this stasis could be put down to the allegedly less evolved attitudes toward women in the UK banking sector,³ we cannot ignore that the culprits in question are global banks with robust global diversity and recruitment policies which are supposed to militate against such outcomes. Second, the FSA controlled function filter is a good one. It captures most everyone who actually qualifies as a “front office,” client-facing investment banker or trader, as opposed to file clerks, IT support people, and other back office and staff drones who can only legitimately claim to be an “investment banker” when they are buying a £300 bottle of vodka for clueless university co-eds at a Soho nightclub. This is important, for the presence of women in non-client-facing, staff positions in investment banking is disproportionally high.⁴ Last, the proportion of women in FSA-controlled positions in investment banking is disturbingly unchanged at only 18% from the first time the FSA collected these statistics in December 2001.⁵

These figures are broadly consistent with my own anecdotal experience over the course of my career. I cannot and will not speak for the sales and trading side of the house, or proprietary trading, but in my hermetically sealed world of corporate finance and M&A the gender balance has stuck roughly in this neighborhood for the last 20 years or so I have belonged to the investment banking guild. At each firm I have belonged to, the number of women in middle-level or senior client-facing or money-making roles has always amounted to ten percent or less of their peer group. The ones with seats are good, aggressive, successful bankers, just like almost every one of their colleagues, but they were and are scarce, notwithstanding almost two decades of determined efforts by most of these banks to boost their number.

The burning question, of course, is why.

* * *

The easy answers—that investment banks actively discriminate against women, that the investment banking “boys’ club” constitutes an unreconstructedly hostile environment for women, or that investment banks are indifferent to improving their gender balance—are demonstrably wrong. Just reading that Financial News article should disprove the first and last of these. I can assure you from personal experience on recruiting and hiring committees that the banks I’ve worked at have gone out of their way to recruit and hire more women, even to the extent of favoring them over other, equally talented male candidates. If you are a smart, driven, aggressive woman, you have an advantage getting into investment banking. Trust me: every bank from Goldman Sachs on down will put its thumb on the scale on your behalf.

The question of environment is a more nuanced one. It cannot be questioned that investment banking—even in the supposedly hushed, buttoned-down precincts of corporate finance and M&A, where I work—is a tense, aggressive place marked by high stakes, intense pressure, and occasionally treacherous infighting. In the not-so-distant past, it also cannot be denied that this environment, dominated as much as it has been by men, often degenerated into cursing, yelling, and fratboy-ish misbehavior likely to offend women, or worse. Overt sexism and sexual harassment were prevalent, just as they were in many industries in this country, and men in positions of power made fools of themselves at women’s expense. But it has been many years since investment banking management has been willing to ignore such hijinks. Now, every bank of size has extensive formal diversity programs and sexual harassment policies in place. These policies have put an end to all kinds of subtle and overt discrimination and behaviors that women and other minority groups might find offensive. Gone are the days when banks turned a blind eye to bankers entertaining clients at strip clubs, Managing Directors hitting on their subordinates, or employees emailing pornography around the corporate intranet. These things still happen every now and then, of course, but when they do the victims have a ready and willing ear for their complaints and the offenders are often fired on the spot.

The tension and aggressiveness of the business remains, however. Given the stakes and money involved, that will never change. But anyone who thinks women cannot succeed in an environment characterized by high pressure performance expectations, political jockeying, and the occasional streak of bad language obviously does not know a lot about women. The successful women bankers I know give as good as they get. What remains can only be characterized as “hostile” by people who cannot tolerate high pressure work environments. That applies to most people, regardless of gender. If that applies to you, we in the industry continue to invite you not to apply for a job in our pressure cooker, no matter what form your personal plumbing takes.

* * *

It is true, as the FN article states, that the number of women who join corporate finance and M&A straight out of college or business school has climbed to a substantially higher percentage than it was in the past. (It remains well short of parity, though.) As I look around my floor, I see women comprising much more like 30 to 40% of the junior bankers below the level of Vice President. I get the sense that this is common across the industry.

We hire less than half of our incoming analyst classes from among women, notwithstanding equal or near-equal gender balances in university populations, because fewer qualified female candidates apply than men. Part of this is due to fewer women enrolling in business, finance, and economics majors, which puts them at a comparative disadvantage relative to men from those same programs. While I have stated in the past that I think extensive prior exposure to finance and accounting is highly overrated as a job qualification for corporate finance or M&A—and I still believe it—I cannot deny that not having those qualifications when everybody else does reflects poorly on a candidate’s demonstrated interest in my profession. It is hard to trust a potential employee has the drive and ambition to spend 100-hour weeks, weeks at a time, modeling and preparing financial presentations when they have not demonstrated significant commitment to similar work in their coursework. And the key criterion we select for in my business, alongside general intelligence and drive, is a burning desire to be an investment banker. Speaking from experience, you have a much higher hill to climb to convince a bank recruiter you have this when the most extensive exposure to numbers you can relate is the time you indexed a professor’s monograph on 19th Century Catalan poetry.

Even in business school, where credentials are more evenly distributed, it seems fewer women in each class apply to investment banks than men. In the dark ages when I got my MBA, there were lots of women in my class, but virtually none of them applied to banks. They opted for marketing, international business, or general corporate roles instead. Perhaps that has changed in the interim, but we can’t hire women if they don’t apply for a job in the first place.

But the real question, nowadays, is why, having hired women into a third or more of our junior professional positions, less than half of them stay as they rise in the ranks.

* * *

One answer could be that, notwithstanding banks’ mostly successful efforts at eliminating overt sexism and discrimination, women get tired of dealing with and/or get shown the exit early due to covert, subconscious, or institutionalized sexism. In other words, senior male colleagues and peers discriminate against women without even knowing it, say, by assigning them lower quality projects, more difficult clients, or impossible bosses. It is certainly possible. Women are scarce in investment banks, so few male investment bankers get to work with, for, or opposite them and thereby have any conscious or unconscious prejudices proved wrong. If embedded sexism exists, it may well be self-reinforcing. But this ignores the project-based, episodic nature of our work, which is very hard to manipulate, the extraordinarily important influence of luck on real and perceived success, and the fact that an important skill in investment banking is learning how to make lemons into lemonade. At a junior level, superior performance is measured by a relentlessly positive attitude, hard work, attention to detail, and an eagerness to do anything and everything your superiors want and need. At more senior levels, where a banker begins to manage clients and deals directly, performance is measured directly by monetary results, which depend not only on effort and intelligence but also on luck. Both of these sets of criteria are largely in the control of each individual banker, and their evaluation is public enough that it would be very difficult to consistently manipulate it in a sexist or discriminatory fashion.⁶

Another answer may be that the duration, timing, and demands of an investment banking career are simply incompatible with many women’s other important interests. In particular, while an analyst typically has a two- or three-year stint directly after college, after which most are encouraged to leave and get an MBA (and some elect to make the jump into private equity or hedge funds), a woman entering investment banking as an associate after business school can anticipate at least a decade before she can begin to exercise some measure of control over her life. Associates usually start in their mid- to late twenties, spend three to five years before promotion to Vice President, and then spend four to seven years or more getting to Managing Director. All during that time, they work incredibly long hours, travel like maniacs, and basically do not have any personal life to speak of. For many women, this span from their mid-twenties to their mid-thirties coincides with what they envision as the period when they will get married and start a family. While this is true for many men, also, I think most of us can agree that committing to a career in investment banking is a much more fraught and difficult decision for a woman than it is for a man. This stage is also one when junior bankers are not making enough money to make it feasible to hire full time help to care for young children. A female Vice President is certainly physically capable of having a baby while traveling 150 days a year and working upwards of 80 hours per week, but unless her spouse or partner is rolling in dough him- or herself (or willing to stay at home), she simply will not be able to afford to outsource its care.

A final answer may lie in the nature of my business itself. As I have explained many times before, corporate finance and M&A are extremely expensive, intangible commodity services. They are not sold or bought on the basis of superior service quality (which is effectively impossible to determine, either ex ante or ex post) or price (which is largely uniform across providers). The services we sell (mergers, IPOs, LBOs) tend to be extremely important and very frightening to our customers, who tend to be infrequent and inexperienced buyers of those services. Accordingly, they usually rely on two chief factors to choose their service provider: the bank’s own brand name and reputation, and their trust in the senior banker pitching for the business. Trust, and the relationship it is built on, can only be cultivated over time between a banker and a client who are in some important ways sympatico. Among the features which drive such sympathy, we must surely include personality, background, common interests, and compatibility. It is not unreasonable, at least to me, to think some clients would accordingly be more comfortable selecting an investment banker who happens to be more like them; that is, one who is also a man or woman. One would certainly expect this effect to be strong among sexist men.

To the extent this last factor has any effect on the selection of investment bankers by clients, which I would argue it does, at least at the margin, we might be able to explain why so few women succeed as high-powered corporate finance or M&A bankers. It may be because, as we all know, so very few of the CEOs and board members selecting investment bankers in this country tend to be women themselves, and so many of the men in those positions are sexist bastards.

In other words, the problem of too-few women in senior investment banking positions is likely to be much bigger than investment banking. You’re just not gonna be able to replace the QWERTY keyboard with another goddamn seminar.⁷


Related reading:
Richard Partington, Gender split little changed for a decade (Financial News, February 26, 2013)
Fingernails that Shine Like Justice (May 21, 2007)
Mine’s Bigger Than Yours (April 14, 2007)
Recipe for Success (October 19, 2007)
If the Phone Don’t Ring, You’ll Know It’s Me (October 1, 2011)


¹ Relax. I mean minorities in my historically white, male, Caucasian industry. Just checking to see if you’re paying attention.
² Economists and social scientists alike will be displeased to learn I am basing my perceptions of gender imbalance in my industry, then and now, on anecdotal evidence witnessed and collected firsthand by Yours Truly and trustworthy firsthand sources known thereto. That being said, however, I do get around. Also, if there has been a firm or two comprised primarily of Amazon warriors conducting distaff investment banking in relative obscurity for the past 20 years or any portion thereof, I must say they’ve kept a damn tight lid on it.
³ Alleged by a small number of female investment bankers who have lived and worked in both the US and the UK and not disputed strenuously by the males I’ve discussed it with. While attitudes have apparently changed, some of the stories I’ve heard from London trading floors in the 1990s would make the most determined American male chauvinist’s toes curl.
⁴ The difference between client-facing, revenue-producing or line positions and staff positions is critical. The former generate all the money; the latter, while critical, only support line workers as they make money. Line workers, like salespeople everywhere, make much more money that staff workers. Line departments are profit centers; staff departments are cost centers. Investment banking employment of women is dominated by staff positions: administrative assistants (almost 100%), human resources (almost 100%), legal and compliance (probably much more than 50%), finance, and administration.
⁵ From the Financial News article:

There were 16,034 individuals holding controlled functions at the top-10 banks at the end of January this year. Of these, the gender of 249 employees could not be identified due to unclear data. Of those who could be identified, 12,959, or 82%, were men, while only 2,826, or 18%, were women.

To add to the discomfort of this stark imbalance, FN analysis also shows that little has changed in more than a decade.

At the end of December 2001 – the first year in which the FSA kept a register of approved persons – the same 10 banks employed a total of 15,469 employees in controlled functions. The gender of 268 of those employees could not be identified due to unclear data. Of those who could be identified, 12,422 were men, or 82%, and 2,779, or 18%, were women.

As an aside, I find it intriguing how little changed the absolute number of controlled persons is from 2001 to present. I would be very interested to see a time series of this data over the intervening decade.
⁶ Perhaps some women get discouraged by the senior women already in positions of power in the industry, as a recent study of professional women in other industries suggests. I have not seen this in action (although why would I?). However, it goes contrary to the fact that junior bankers tend to work with a number of senior bankers, men and women, and talented bankers have more flexibility to find a satisfactory working relationship both within their own firm and at competing firms. Junior women do not get automatically assigned to female senior MDs.
⁷ Which isn’t to say, naturally, that we shouldn’t try. I’m on record for getting more women into the industry. We need the talent. I’m just saying we won’t be able to do it all by ourselves.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.