A house of intrigue and infighting.
Among my papers, there survives a senior paper I wrote in the spring of 1972, just before graduating from Harvard Business School. It received an A-plus.
The paper was unlike anything else I had done at HBS. I examined the Wall Street firms where I was then seeking work and tried to assess their future prospects not from their balance sheets or earnings but by what their offices revealed. I studied their decor, layouts, colors schemes, use of space. To me, these were not superficial details, they were clues to culture: how people worked, how power was organized, what a firm valued and what sort of future it might have.
The first firm I considered was Kuhn, Loeb. Its great presiding figure was Jacob Schiff, who had financed Japan's war effort against Russia and helped it prevail in the Russo-Japanese War. Just inside the entrance, the firm announced its past before anyone said a word. There was a huge portrait of Schiff and nearby, smaller photographs of every partner who had followed him.
My verdict was blunt: They do nothing but gaze at the past. They will go out of business. In 1977, Kuhn, Loeb sold itself to Lehman Brothers.
Lehman, for its part, was dimly lit. Its floors were divided into a warren of small offices, a veritable labyrinth. "This physical setting breeds intrigue and infighting," I concluded, "and will eventually cause the firm to die of its own internal problems." So I pronounced—and yet Lehman was the very firm I chose to join.
Wall Street in those days was a place where each house professed its own religion, rather like the fraternity houses of a university. Morgan Stanley was WASP—White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. Merrill Lynch had a strongly Catholic complexion. Goldman Sachs and Lehman were Jewish firms.
Prejudice still lingered and it was not easy for a Jew like me to enter a Gentile firm.
I had an offer from Morgan Stanley, the most prestigious house of them all. But at the junior level Morgan was highly regimented. Young bankers worked within a strict hierarchy. They were like dutiful sons, spending much of their early careers writing prospectuses. That was not the work I wanted.
Lehman, though a Jewish house, had a much more open culture. Among its people were men who had made their names in oil and in entertainment. There was a former senior officer of the Central Intelligence Agency and a U.S. general who had helped airlift food into the blockaded city of West Berlin in the early years of the Cold War. Neither was Jewish. I liked the atmosphere immediately.
What suited me above all was the flatness of the organization. In the corporate division I joined, which handled mergers and acquisitions, and related advisory work, a single partner would often pair with one associate to carry a deal forward. At the larger houses, one partner might have four juniors beneath him. At Lehman, I was given real responsibility early. I learned fast.
Whenever something caught my interest, I would think like an entrepreneur: "Could there be a new business in this?"
I preferred an environment in which I could learn from one man and still move freely, rather than be absorbed into some vast institutional machine. Lehman was less prestigious than Morgan Stanley, but for me it was the natural choice. I still believe I chose well.
The early going, even so, was hard.
In my first year, I traveled to St. Louis, Missouri, to visit a client. Eric Gleacher, the partner on the assignment, noticed on the outbound flight that in the materials I had prepared for a proposed restructuring of the client's business, one set of figures was wrong.
"You know, you've done a set of these numbers wrong," he said. "Just take out the bad pages and I can talk my way through the rest of it," he told me.
But in my panic I removed and discarded the correct pages. The erroneous pages were the ones that ended up in the client's hands. Eric did not speak to me for some time. At the airport on the way home, he said only, "If you ever do that again, I'm firing you on the spot."
The mortification was unbearable. I swore I would never make such a blunder twice.
I froze, too, at the first meeting I attended in the company of Lew Glucksman, who would later become chief executive. Without warning, he fixed me with a glare and bellowed, in front of the whole room, "Why aren't you sitting up straight?" Lew was clever and possessed a keen instinct for business, but from time to time he lost command of his emotions.
Years later, he and I would both play roles, in different capacities, in the sale of Lehman.
To return to the paper I wrote at Harvard, the intrigue and infighting I had seen in Lehman's physical layout proved exactly as I had foretold. At Lehman, success made you a target. The moment you did well, someone envied you. I spent my years there dividing my time in equal halves—one half bringing deals to fruition, the other half making sure I survived.
Originally published in the Nikkei, October 2026