Category: Career Memoir

Outwitting History

The Book of the Week is “Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books” by Aaron Lansky, published in 2005. The author of this ebook, passionate about the Yiddish language and the culture and history behind it, made a career of preserving books in Yiddish by physically transporting them to an eventual library he and a few others started.

Lansky attended a Northeastern free-spirited college, Hampshire, where he was afforded the opportunity to become fluent in Yiddish. Teaching of the language between generations has been uneven because different factions of Jews have different opinions of it so that its popularity has risen and fallen through the centuries. Lansky felt a sense of immediacy about saving Yiddish literature because he was told that scholars “…estimated that there were seventy thousand Yiddish volumes extant and recoverable in North America” and he was finding out that books were being destroyed for diverse reasons in various ways.

Funding and fundraising have always been a challenge for the author through the decades. To pick up hundreds of Yiddish volumes at once, say, from the home of an intellectual Jew who had passed away, he needed to pay for: renting a truck, gas, insurance, travel expenses, storage, etc. Lecturing has also been a source of money for his endeavors.

Read the book to learn how the National Yiddish Book Center was formed, how he recruited other people to help him with collecting books, the social and cultural organizations to which he traveled to collect them, the food he was pressured to eat while meeting a lot of volunteers of the older generation who shared his love of, and desire to keep Yiddish alive, and how his organization is harnessing modern technology to attain its aims.

Why I Left Goldman Sachs

The Book of the Week is “Why I Left Goldman Sachs” by Greg Smith, published in 2012.

This career memoir details how the author experienced the change for the worse in corporate culture of stock brokerage Goldman Sachs (GS) over the course of a little more than a decade, from 2000 to early 2012. The company lost its way in terms of its mission and values, which embodied fiduciary duty and integrity.

In 2000, the author completed the selective, elitist, highly coveted summer internship program at the brokerage. He saw how principled the money managers were in recommending truly suitable transactions to their clients; not necessarily the most profitable ones.

When he began working there as a full-fledged staff member the following year, he took to the work, possessing the right combination of talents, skills and abilities to focus for long hours on conferring with clients and doing what was financially best for them. The goal was to build trust in order to foster a long-term relationship. It stands to reason that that is a more profitable course of action than seeking to rake in maximum money in the short term– which would provoke disloyalty from the client, when the client realizes he’s been taken advantage of.

Smith writes that a gradual change was occurring at his workplace around the start of 2005. At the time, he admittedly was “drinking the Kool Aid” like everyone else. The megabucks were multiplying because conflicts of interest were increasing betwen the brokerage and the government and other entities with which the brokerage was associated in various ways. The CEO and COO of GS were all for it. Their yearly letter to shareholders reasoned that such conflicts were inevitable, and were a sign that business was good. A telling example: GS netted approximately $100 million when it helped its client, the New York Stock Exchange merge with publicly traded, electronic exchange Archipelago in a $9 billion deal.

In the early 2000’s, one trend in the securities industry that would contribute to huge financial losses for the big firms including GS, was automated trading via software. The autotraders of the different firms were programmed to engage in largely the same behavior. They sought to trade in obscure, off-the-beaten path investments in markets in which it was difficult to find a buyer when it came time to sell. And they were all trying to sell at the same time. That was not a condition the autotrader creators had anticipated.

Another aspect of the big picture was that the people selling the financial products– more specifically, derivatives– did not themselves, understand what they were selling. It might be recalled that a derivatives debacle plagued the securities industry in 1994. Apparently, in 2007-2009, the greedy people involved in this rerun of a financial catastrophe failed to read their history, or had short memories. And governments of entire countries like Libya, were suffering losses of billions of dollars, thanks to GS, in 2007.

Read the book to learn much more about the outrageous occurrences borne of avarice witnessed by the author and the world during what became for him, an ordeal, characterized by the saying, “The fish rots from the head down.”

Here’s the Deal – Bonus Post

This blogger read Howie Mandel’s autobiography, “Here’s the Deal: Don’t Touch Me” published in 2009.

Mandel has been a TV and movie actor, game show host and stand-up comedian. In this ebook, he reveals all of his psychological issues– ADHD, OCD, desperate need for attention, etc; “I was constantly consumed with my own pranks. I had no sense of boundaries.” Although his creative antics are amusing, he has poor impulse control. This has led to damaged relationships.

Read the book to learn how he became famous, despite, or arguably, due to his various mental and physical problems– he has used entertaining others as a coping mechanism to forget about the negative aspects of his identity.

All or Nothing

The Book of the Week is “All or Nothing” by Jesse Schenker, published in 2014. This suspenseful, eloquently written ebook tells the exceptional life story of a member of America’s “Generation Y” who has beaten the odds for survival, considering his situation.

“I had two jobs and no place to stay, but I literally cared more about having drugs than even a roof over my head… at night I slept outside, swathed in a blanket of newspaper… ”

The author describes in vivid detail his ordeal in connection with substance abuse– of his own making– and how he got through it. He wrote that in Fort Lauderdale, sellers of illicit drugs diluted their wares with “… laxatives, Benadryl, sugar, starch, talc, brick dust, or even f–g Ajax” and how all junkies commit thievery against each other.

Schenker also recounts his experiences in the restaurant industry, where he encountered other addicts in the kitchen. The culture is also one of an abusive hierarchy; the justification for this is that everything must be perfect. On more than one occasion, when the author’s food preparation was less than perfect, he was loudly berated and had a tray with his creations violently thrown at his chest.

Read the book to learn how Schenker transferred his skills at manipulating other people, from getting high to getting his career in gear. Malcolm Gladwell would categorize him as an “outlier.”

Diary of a Hedge Fund Manager

The Book of the Week is “Diary of a Hedge Fund Manager” by Keith McCullough and Rich Blake, published in 2010. This sloppily proofread ebook is about McCullough’s passion for ice hockey, and personal experience on Wall Street in the the single-digit 2000’s.

McCullough grew up playing hockey in the Thunder Bay area of Canada. He had a dream of playing professionally, but built a career in the stock market in the United States instead.

At the turn of the 21st century, Ivy-League college connections allowed McCullough to get a job with money managers. He spent a short time at a few places, having been lured to the next place by more money. The companies were able to run legalized Ponzi schemes because they had “… access to institutional channels, corporate and state pension funds, nonprofit foundations, and university endowments, not to mention the world’s wealthiest individuals…”

Most of the hedge funds of that period engaged in poisonous groupthink– cartelizing behavior (but apparently were never taken to task by the government for price-fixing/monopolistic practices)– they all bought the same stocks to overhype them and push up their prices artificially. They “… had devolved into nothing more than highly touted engines for producing excessive compensation.”

Read the book to learn:

  • the steps McCullough took to co-found a hedge fund and how he and it fared;
  • what else he has been doing;
  • how he defines a trade, a trend and a tail; and
  • the method he uses and philosophy he espouses to sense what is going to happen in the market.

Here are two hints: He thinks closing share prices and integrity are very important.

Sirio

The Book of the Week is “Sirio, The Story of My Life and Le Cirque” by Sirio Maccioni and Peter Elliot, published in 2004.

Sirio, born in spring 1932, came from a poor family in the resort city of Montecatini in Tuscany. His immediate family members could read, unlike most other people his family knew. His father had been a multi-lingual concierge who worked long hours at a hotel. His uncles worked long hours on the farm. Since he was orphaned at an early age, and was short on education, he felt his career options were limited. He therefore fell into the role of waiter at a hotel restaurant. In the 1930’s, waiters were required to dress elegantly, be multilingual and actually prepare food in front of diners at the table.

In the 1950’s, Sirio was receiving training the traditional French way as a hotel chef. But he was part of a trend later labeled “nouvelle cuisine”– meaning preparing food creatively– putting a regional, personal touch on the food. “…And they [the chefs] refused to treat people badly… Paris was still ruled by the hotel mentality.”

The French had an elitist system whereby the trainees slaved away long hours and were bullied unmercifully so only the most dedicated ones survived. If they were courageous, they started their own restaurants and repeated the cycle with their underlings. As was common for aspiring chefs of his generation, Sirio paid his dues in a few different European cities. In the 1960’s, he basically played the role of greeter at an upscale hotel restaurant in New York. He was skillful at this job, given his diplomatic temperament with the rich and famous diners.

Sirio has these words of wisdom for the reader: “There’s a saying, ‘The customer is always right.’ Not true. Not always. The customer always gets what he wants. Very different. All I do is try to understand what they want.” and “You know, if you talk to a real man, not a phony, they tell you where and how they learn things… So many chefs I know just pretend to know things… Many times in the kitchen they don’t want to learn anything at all, especially not from an owner…”

Read the book to learn how Sirio finally got to run a restaurant of his own; of the chefs he employed (including his falling-out with Daniel Boulud who behaved  unprofessionally at the end); his adventures in the business; and how Sirio’s co-author gets a bit full of Sirio when he boldly proclaims, “By 1981 Le Cirque was the most famous restaurant in the world.”