interview on Wall Street an hour early, because I didn’t want to be late. I sat in a Chock Full o’Nuts coffee shop nursing a cup of coffee, the one cup I could afford, checking my watch every couple of minutes. When 9:00 a.m. arrived, I went into the headquarters of Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette at 140 Broadway, up to the thirty-sixth floor.
So we formulated a clear set of expectations, which I laid out in a welcome speech to our new analysts. It boiled down to two words:. If we delivered excellent performance for our investors and maintained a pristine reputation, we would have the opportunity to grow and pursue ever more interesting and rewarding work. If we invested poorly or compromised our integrity, we would fail.we hired a young banker from the corporate finance division at Drexel Burnham Lambert.
And right on cue, a few months after we closed, steel prices began to nosedive. Edgcomb’s inventory was now worth less than they had paid for it and dropping in value every day. The profits we anticipated, which were to pay our borrowing costs, never materialized. We couldn’t make our debt payments. Edgcomb was imploding, just as David Stockman predicted it would.
I had fallen into a trap common to many organizations. In my enthusiasm to give a new partner a shot with the Edgcomb deal, I had made myself and the firm vulnerable. I had succumbed to a good sales pitch. I learned later that one of the analysts on this new partner’s team had opposed the deal. He couldn’t see it ever working. But the partner had told him to keep his doubts to himself.
We decided to involve all of our senior partners in our discussions of investments. We would never again allow one person single-handedly to green-light a deal. During my career, I had gotten things more right than wrong, but Edgcomb had shown that I was far from infallible. My colleagues had decades of experience. By working together, arguing and applying our collective wisdom to evaluate an investment’s risks, we hoped we could examine our deals more objectively.
Long before Arianna Huffington launched Huffington Post, 36 publishers rejected her second book. Before Walt Disney built Disneyland, he was told he lacked creativity. Bill Gates’ first company was a disaster, with a product that barely worked.
Really? What planet is this quote from?
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That's a very good one ! Because at that level, failures are unavoidable pretty much !
Precisely.
Only if the leadership is capable of learning from failures. In a Trump's world he doesn't take any responsibility so he'll never learn anything.
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