The Devil's Casino_ Friendship, Betrayal - Vicky Ward [71]
the Lehman gym and be shocked. Because of the surgery, he was on strong pain
medication for months. Jack says he came back to work much sooner than he was
supposed to for fear that Gregory would somehow impede his job. "I even had the staples
in my stomach when I went back to the office," he says. "But I was so afraid that if I
stayed at home to recuperate Joe would somehow find a way to unseat me."
Gregory meanwhile set to work on his new passion--building a culture for Lehman that
was groundbreaking in its emphasis on diversity and inclusion. As Lehman opened in two
new locations it was undergoing an internal makeover. Fuld used the relocation as an
excuse to reinstate his "no casual Friday" policy.
An in-house memo from 2002 noted that there was no female or minority representation
on the executive committee. No one doubted that Gregory would change the situation as
soon as he could, and he immediately put himself in charge of the in-house group, the
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT) Network. There was also an Asian
League, a Women's Initiatives Leading Lehman (WILL) organization, and others.
Gregory then hired a group of executives--as many as 30--to run inclusion and diversity
programs and to make sure that recruitment extended to minorities.
At Gregory's behest, all senior employees took the Myers-Briggs typology test, a
personality assessment that sorts people into psychological types. (Enron had also used
Myers-Briggs to help evaluate senior personnel.) Gregory wanted to do this so that
people could understand their own strengths and weaknesses and learn to work better
with their colleagues. Some executives complained that the test--part of a larger "cultural
induction course" that was held over the course of a few days--was a "waste of time."
Gregory's diversity program was derided in part because it was as big and expensive to
run as some of the revenue-producing divisions. It was more expensive and had more
employees than all of risk management. Behind his back, senior executives called the
program "Joe's social science project." Someone nicknamed him "the Oprah Winfrey of
Wall Street."
Gregory wasn't dissuaded by such grumblings; he knew the attention and money that
Lehman spent on diversity made for good public relations. Indeed, Harvard Business
School would even publish a paper on Gregory's diversity program and its
accomplishments.
Gregory was not a target for mockery because of his big -picture cultural goals for
Lehman, which were laudable. He became a target because he had a smallness about him;
he was man who was emotional and had instinctive likes and dislikes that sometimes
seemed to inhibit common sense. He also seemed to grow increasingly distant from the
business he was meant to be supervising.
One anecdote illustrates Gregory's shortcomings. In Lehman's lore, it is called "the glass
door story."
Bob Millard had always irked Gregory. Millard was extremely bright--a well-educated
and self-described intellectual. He quoted, with ease, Richard Dawkins, Charles Darwin,
and William Shakespeare. He had an MBA from Harvard and a degree in architecture
from MIT. His returns on his investment business, now named Realm Partners (which
was funded by Lehman), were legendary. His compensation was even greater than that of
Fuld or Gregory since he took a percentage of his fund's profits, rather than the firm's. He
was also widely liked within the firm, and he would talk as often to assistants as to senior
executives. Yet he was not on the executive committee, in part because he also didn't
want to have his compensation lowered to the same level as the other executives.
Millard's revenues had been lifesaving for Lehman during the 1990s, and he was
somebody Fuld was careful to cultivate. He was definitely not someone Fuld wanted to
offend.
Millard believed Gregory disliked everyone who, like Millard, had a direct line to Fuld.
(This had been part of Gregory's problem with Goldfarb, who was directly reporting to