Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
MARCH 11, 2024 – (Cont.) That evening I went for a long run—a very long run. As I circled Lake Como in St. Paul, a mile from our neighborhood, I resolved to see my firing as a positive event. Just as a Politburo member’s “catching a cold” had been laughable code for “falling from power,” …
MARCH 10, 2024 – (Cont.) Two weeks later, the newly anointed boss came to town to meet his former peers, now subordinates. He was as inscrutable as ever. I imagined that behind his back he carried a sharpened ax. From his perch in Dan’s old office, he began a series of one-on-one meetings with his …
MARCH 9, 2024 – (Cont.) As most of my peers and I had foreseen, the day arrived when Dan departed for a bigger and better job in the corporate empire of what was now Wells Fargo Bank. The merger had taken everyone by surprise, including the president of Norwest Bank, who reportedly was informed of …
MARCH 8, 2024 – (Cont.) If the copyright police in the law department had caught wind what I was up to, they would’ve wrecked the party. A few months before they’d come down on the “My Favorite Boss!” woman, who had bamboozled Dan into appointing her as head of marketing for the whole department. One …
MARCH 7, 2024 – (Cont.) About 18 months after he’d taken over the reins, Dan announced that he wanted us—his direct reports—to take turns leading the department’s periodic “business update” meetings. These had been all-department gatherings in the ballroom-turned-corporate meeting venue at a downtown hotel, led by our fearless leader and featuring the department’s year-to-date …
MARCH 6, 2024 – (Cont.) As Dan found his stride, his minions fell into line behind him, and we all landed “in the dough” thanks in large part to the Clinton Era economy. My own group was ringing the bell consistently from quarter to quarter. In a public company, however, there’s no rest for the …
MARCH 5, 2024 – (Cont.) In time Keith’s replacement, [Dan], was named. He had no background in corporate or even personal trust. In the wake of Keith’s tumultuous reign, we needed law and order, and Dan was the perfect man for the job. Orderly, cordial, even-keeled and disciplined, he lacked originality, but after Keith’s unchecked …
MARCH 4, 2024 – (Cont.) As the president plunged straight into his interrogation of me, what flashed across my memory was the chain of my career junctions, starting on a memorable day nearly a decade earlier. At that time I was in the middle of my second stint at First Bank, which later became USBank. …
MARCH 3, 2024 – (Cont.) I prepared meticulously for my interrogation, reviewing meticulously the record of my association with Keith from our very first encounter. I relied heavily on my daily journals covering the previous three years. A few minutes in advance of the appointed time I made my way to the C-suite. It was …
MARCH 2, 2024 – (Cont.) The man who “sometimes couldn’t believe how smart [he] was” wound up blowing himself up. As time passed, my peers and I noticed ever-increasing disturbing behavior on his part. The full range of his antics reflected an ego that exceeded whatever room—or building— Keith occupied. Among other examples was his …
MARCH 1, 2024 – (Cont.) One of the most bizarre experiences I had during my corporate life was the ignoble departure of the guy who’d hired me. Hmmm . . . one sentence into the story and I’m getting way ahead of myself. When I first met Keith [a made-up name to protect him and …
FEBRUARY 29, 2024 – (Cont.) Perhaps the biggest display of repulsive arrogance I experienced in the workplace occurred during an “off-site” meeting of my department at Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly. The idea was for partners and associates to gather at a corporate meeting center where isolated from our (land line) phones and (desktop) screens and …
FEBRUARY 28, 2024 – What I found fascinating about working in large organizational settings were the endless lessons in applied psychology—or was it simply an endless loop of the seven deadly sins?[1] I’m certain that my work places weren’t exceptional in this regard. We humans are a baffling species, especially when we occur in combinations …
FEBRUARY 27, 2024 – Recently our eight-year-old granddaughter asked my wife and me, “When you were young, did you have technology?” I thought of several snarky responses, such as, “How old do you think we are?!” and not as defensively, “Yeah. The wheel and the lever.” A less sarcastic reply to her innocent question might’ve …
FEBRUARY 26, 2024 – (Cont.) Our firm had a client who bought a local short-line railroad out of bankruptcy. The company had gone off the rails financially, and our client was able to purchase it for scrap value. Except our client, being a very clever fellow, knew it was worth far more than salvage. While …
FEBRUARY 25, 2024 – Whether your career has been bagging groceries, teaching generations of first-graders, pushing paper then its digital equivalent in a government office, playing clarinet for decades in a symphony orchestra, filling prescriptions at the last standing locally-owned pharmacy, restoring thousands to health in an operatory of the cardiology wing of a hospital, …
FEBRUARY 24, 2024 – (Cont.) Few secrets can remain secrets forever, and even before Al Gore invented the internet, people figured out the means to investigate, uncover, and sound the alarm. One day well into the buyer’s due diligence period, I received a call from one of the lawyers handling the buyer’s application for a …
FEBRUARY 23, 2024 – (Cont.) No one was the wiser to Ray’s little escapade with the 55-gallon drums. The guys in the haz-mat suits did their thing, oblivious to the fact that Ray and his buddies dressed in ordinary work clothes had loaded up the drums, ferried them all the way across town, unloaded them …
FEBRUARY 22, 2024 – Anyone who’s dealt with the sale, purchase, financing, or development of commercial real estate knows that you have to cross the bridge over potentially troubled environmental waters. Back in the day, landowners dumped out the back door—or back 40—pretty much anything they wanted to. A lot of it was very nasty …
FEBRUARY 21, 2024 – (Cont.) What I experience performing or speaking in front of a crowd varies depending on the size of the crowd. I tend to be more nervous in front of 10 readily identifiable people than I am before a sea of anonymous faces. For the bondholders meeting we’d expected the latter—legions of …
FEBRUARY 20, 2024 – (Cont.) Before taking the job at Norwest Bank and getting mixed up with the ELIC matter, I’d never heard of the law firm of Hunton & Williams (now “Hunton Andrews Kurth”), based as it was in Richmond, Virginia, which from my provincial perspective might as well have been Timbuktu. But what …
FEBRUARY 19, 2024 – (Cont.) It soon came to pass that Tom Kimer and I were aboard a Northwest flight bound for LaGuardia. It was an evening trip—several years before complimentary meals in coach were discontinued. After our onboard repast, I pulled out a legal pad to outline a strategy for our “cats and free-range …
FEBRUARY 18, 2024 – (Cont.) Each trustee bank “lawyered up.” One Texas bank, in an abundance of caution, brought two six-shooters instead of one to the fight: a primary law firm and a secondary firm to keep an eye on the primary one. Norwest retained Tom Kimer, head of the litigation department of Faegre & …
FEBRUARY 17, 2024 – Very little of my daily work life in the trenches was of much interest to people beyond the immediate parties involved, who were usually quite limited in number. In a couple of instances, my name—misspelled—appeared in a back-page newspaper article about a work-related matter, but such publicity wasn’t significant enough for …
FEBRUARY 16, 2024 – Time to take a break from the practice of law to talk about the business of . . . business: money. Or more specific to my tale, money in politics. For most of the 1990s I took a break from practicing law to work as a client for others practicing law. …