Too Big to Fail [17]
“You’re the best business fixer I have,” Fuld told him, vowing that with Gregory’s help he would do away with the backbiting that had nearly torn the firm apart in the 1980s. Fuld began by slashing payroll. By the end of 1996, the staff had shrunk by 20 percent, to around 7,500 employees. At the same time that he was downsizing, he was adopting a smoother management style. To his own surprise Fuld proved to be at good at massaging egos, wooing new talent, and, perhaps most shocking for a trader, schmoozing clients. As Fuld recast himself as the public face of the firm, Gregory became the chief operating officer: “Inside” to Fuld’s “Mr. Outside.” Yes, Fuld had become one of the “fucking bankers,” intently focused on one goal: boosting the newly public company’s stock price. Lehman shares were increasingly doled out to employees; eventually the workforce owned a third of the firm. “I want my employees to act like owners,” Fuld told his managers.
To encourage teamwork, he adopted a point system similar to the one that he used to reward his son, Richie, when he played hockey. Fuld taped his son’s games and would inform him, “You get one point for a goal, but two points for an assist.” He had some other choice paternal advice for his son that he also applied at Lehman: “If one of your teammates gets attacked, fight back like hell!” At Lehman, senior executives were compensated based on the performances of their team.
If you were loyal to Fuld, he was loyal to you. Almost everyone at Lehman had heard the story about his vacation with James Tisch, the chief executive of Loews, and his family. The group went hiking together in Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. Nearly a mile down from the rim of the canyon, Tisch’s ten-year-old son, Ben, had an asthma attack and began panicking when he realized he had left his inhaler back on top of the canyon.
Fuld and Tisch took charge, helping the boy to make the hike back. “Ben, lead the way,” Fuld instructed, trying to build up the boy’s confidence.
Halfway up they encountered another hiker who looked at Ben and said, “My, aren’t we wheezy today.”
Fuld, without slowing, turned on him and shouted with a memorable ferocity: “Eat shit and die! Eat shit and die!”
Exhilarated by Fuld’s defense of him, Ben nearly ran up the rest of the way.
Perhaps Fuld’s greatest moment as a leader came after the 9/11 attacks. As the world was literally crumbling around him he instilled a spirit of camaraderie that helped keep the firm together. The day after the towers were hit, Fuld attended a meeting at the New York Stock Exchange to discuss when it should reopen. Asked if Lehman would be able to trade, he told the room, almost on the verge of tears, “We don’t even know who’s alive.”
In the final reckoning, Lehman lost only one employee. But the firm’s global headquarters at 3 World Financial Center was so severely damaged it was unusable. Fuld set up makeshift offices for his 6,500 employees at a Sheraton hotel on Seventh Avenue in Midtown; a few weeks later he personally negotiated a deal to buy a building from one of his archrivals, Morgan Stanley, which had never moved into its new headquarters. Within a month Lehman Brothers was up and running in a new location as if nothing at all had happened. But there was one casualty of the move: Fuld’s stuffed gorilla was lost in the shuffle and never replaced. Gregory later pointed out that both Fuld and the firm had outgrown it.
For all his talk about change, however, Fuld did not so much overhaul Lehman’s corporate culture as tweak it. He instituted a subtler version of the paranoid, combative worldview propagated by Glucksman. The martial metaphors remained: “Every day is a battle,” Fuld barked at his executives. “You have to kill the enemy.” But traders and bankers were no longer at each other’s throats, and for a while, at least, Lehman was less riven by internal