best advice

This is a fabulous article that Ben received at work this morning. It's worth a read if you are interested.

Best Advice I Ever Got - Stephen Fitzgerald, Managing Director
1 Jun 2007

Stephen Fitzgerald
Investment Management Division, London
"...I make decisions putting my family first every day."
The best advice I ever got was from Jon Corzine. It made a huge impact on me because he was the leader of the firm at the time, and what he said really came from the heart. He was addressing a group of senior Goldman Sachs people on managing their career at Goldman Sachs. I expected him to say, “We want everyone to work hard”, but what he chose to say was, “When you’re leaving the firm and you look back at your career, you never say to yourself, I wish I did that extra meeting. You will look back and you say to yourself, I wish I’d spent that extra hour with my family.”

I was told that a career at Goldman Sachs was either a marathon or a sprint. If you wanted to sprint, the firm would let you, but you wouldn’t necessarily last 15 years at that pace. Running a career marathon changes the way you deal with the pace at which you work. It changes the way you deal with the balance between work and home and the way you deal with issues when they arise.

In the marathon, there’s plenty of time for work, but there’s only a certain amount of time for your family. Whenever I am making a decision on where I am going to be based geographically or whether or not to go to a parents’ night or a school play, I make sure that family comes first. At these moments you think, there are plenty of meetings to go to at Goldman Sachs but there are only a certain number of parents’ nights.

One of my colleagues reinforced this by telling me that I needed to make decisions based on what was right for me and my family, because the firm would work around me, or there would always be another person who could step in and do the job. No one is ever bigger than the firm. This person had actually not lived their life according to their advice and had messed up their family life, they were trying to make me see that the marathon was the right way to work and enjoy both a successful career and family life.

I try to lead by example and leave early but it’s hard. When I worked in Japan it was especially hard, but when people saw that the boss was leaving at a reasonable hour, or making the decision that he won’t be in tomorrow because he has to go to a school play, it was simpler. When you see senior people doing it, it makes it easier for more junior people to do the same. I’m very public about it when I leave, and my calendar is accessible to everyone. When I’ve got a parents’ day coming up, I block out that time in my diary and everyone can see what it’s for.

I think this kind of decision making allows you to achieve longevity in your career, but 15 years here is a long time, and it comes back to what I was told about the sprint and the marathon. Perhaps your decisions are not related to family, maybe you feel like you should have become a managing director this year and didn’t become one, but if it’s a long-term game you’re playing it doesn’t really matter, because if you deserve it you’ll become one next year.

Part of running the marathon is also acting consistently and playing a fair and honest game. One of my old bosses once said to me, “There’s only one thing we sell and that’s trust”. This may have been specific to investment management, but it applies to anything. Clients trust us to do the right thing, and particularly when you’re in investment management and you’re appointed to manage clients’ money, they trust that you’re going to do it in a prudent manner. The worst thing you could do is breach that trust.

I think about that every day too, not only when interacting with clients, but also with colleagues. If your attitude is to sprint, you might see a short-term benefit to the firm relative to the benefit to the client, where you could swing the balance slightly towards the firm. But if you’re running a marathon, you are inclined to be honest with the client because that’s always respected and encourages a long-term and trusting client relationship. The consequences of being dishonest or not being fulsome in your disclosure in order to attain a ‘quick fix’ may mean that the client trust is irreparable.

We need to be willing to take a stand on what is right, and especially as a senior person in the firm, I think you have more of a responsibility to insert yourself into things you don’t feel are right, even if they are none of your business. If you see something you think is wrong, you need to have the courage to speak up, even though it could upset your colleagues. It may be something we could get away with from a commercial perspective, it may be legal, but it’s just not right for this firm. It’s so important to be firm on this because I think it’s our integrity and reputation that are paramount to our success. We see other firms doing things all the time that are maybe commercially attractive short-term, or may be the easy answer, but they’re not necessarily the right thing, and long-term we want to be known as a company that does the right thing.

Jon’s advice has been very helpful - I think about it all the time and I make decisions putting my family first every day. There’s much to be said for running a marathon as opposed to a sprint. It gives you time to know and enjoy the important things in life and to make the right decisions.