| Entertaining speech #1 Around the world in 80 days – more or less Jules Verne, one of the founders of the genre that has become known as science fiction, wrote a story of a man who, on a bet, went around the world in 80 days. At that time, 1870, such a trip would have seemed unbelievably fast. Michael Palin, one of the cast of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, did a modern day documentary/travelogue tracing out the same route not using airplanes or cars (except for taxis within cities), that was quite popular. I have my own versions of this – more or less. What I have done is go around the world faster, in about 80 hours, and also slower, in 8 years. The quick trip accomplished nothing, nada, zero! I was living in Singapore at the time, trading currency options for Bank of America. There was to be meetings in New York and Philadelphia about a possible joint venture with an options trading firm. I was picked to represent Asia. My Singapore Airlines flight went via Frankfurt, and I arrived at JFK Sunday around noon, just as the first few flakes of snow began accumulating into what would later be known as the blizzard of ’96. People coming in from nearer places like London, San Francisco, and White Plains were scheduled to arrive later, but the airport and the whole transportation system closed down, so they never left home. The meetings were postponed, and my colleague’s wife, back in Singapore was due to give birth next week. I needed to be back there to cover for him, or so I thought. The airport stayed closed for about 30 hours, so the first flight leaving for Singapore was on United with a layover in Tokyo. Fortunately, I was flying business class, and it did add to my frequent flyer miles. The meeting was rescheduled for the next week. Management insisted I attend, so my colleague was obliged to upset his wife by showing up at work for a couple hours each day. I wonder why he left the bank later that year? I, however, had made two circumnavigations in two weeks But that trip took place in the middle of the longer one. This is my eleventh speech, but my first one here, so I decided to work in a few details you might learn in an icebreaker. I was born in California, back when there were fewer people there than here. My father was transferred to New York to set up a sales office when I was in kindergarten. He hated to commute, but didn’t want to raise kids in the city, so he picked office space near Grand Central and decided to get off the train and buy a house in the first town where he could see green, as in grass and trees. He picked the New Haven line as he had some friends in Connecticut. That meant Pelham, in Westchester County. Four years later he was promoted and we were moving back to California. The head office had moved to Long Beach (south of LA), where I lived though high school. I went to UCLA, undergrad in economics, got married before my senior year, continued there for an MBA in Finance. My first real job was at a bank in New York. Most of my classmates stayed on the west coast, asking how I could leave California. I replied that I had lived here before, so it was “Insanity, not Ignorance”. Three years later I joined a French bank in New York, where I spent the 80’s, of which three were in the Paris head office. They wanted to move me back there again, but it was a case of “Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt”, besides the taxes were high there and this time it was to be of indefinite duration and not on an expatriate package of perks. So I looked around and contacted an ex-colleague now at a British bank. A few interviews, some paperwork and the long version of my around the world trek would begin! The paperwork included getting a work visa for Britain, with the key question, as their unemployment rate is higher than ours, “Why can’t a European do this job?” We are all unique, it is just a matter of finding a combination of characteristics and experiences that sounds sufficiently rare as not to be available locally. Either they believed my essay or the bank pulled enough strings, so that late in 1990 my wife, my not-quite-3-year-old son and I were moving to London. After a couple of years the bank I was working for was acquired, and this created a seeming log-jam of managers and deputies for every role. Promotion prospects appeared stalled so I listened when a headhunter called and accepted a job at Bank of America. The pay was better, and I thought I might eventually get transferred back to California. So I told my boss that the new head of currency options at Bank of America wanted to meet with him. He fell for it, asking “Who is that?” “You’re looking at him!” was my reply. After two years, Bank of America then asked me to go out to Singapore to set up a currency options desk there. I agreed. Singapore is a lot like Beverly Hills in a jungle. To a westerner, it is the easiest introduction to living in Asia. You can drink the water, it is clean and safe, almost everyone speaks English. Some people complain about its rules, but as I don’t smoke and almost never chew gum, the rules were also a plus. The joint venture that we were investigating on the 80 hour orbit never materialized, so we reorganized the options business. When my two year assignment in Singapore was up, I applied for and received a transfer to market risk management in the San Francisco head office. At our peril, we ignored the musical advice and didn’t wear flowers in our hair on the flight. As the bank was too big to be taken over, my mother and brother lived nearby, I bought a house, expecting that we had stopped wandering. We have since learned to say, when someone asks if we are here permanently, that we are here indefinitely, instead. If you read the papers, you may know what happened next. Nationsbank and Bank of America agreed to merger in 1998. Most the risks I was monitoring were in New York, so I volunteered to come back here. I still owned a house here. California schools, even in a good community, were barely adequate. It was a case of be careful what you wish for, you might get it. The San Francisco bay area is nice, but for our family, in our circumstances, we prefer New York. |