With the movie finally upon us and garnering good reviews and #1 status its opening weekend, it’s a perfect time to look behind the scenes at Wall Street, Money Never Sleeps…a film over 20 years in the making and one on which the author Anthony Scaramucci played an advisory role. Interestingly, the stories of greed are not limited to the environs of Manhattan’s Financial District or the mind of director Oliver Stone. In fact the allegories played out by Shia LeBeouf and Michael Douglas could easily relevant to the lessons Mark Zuckerberg could take to the bank.
What better way to take the pulse of the market today than to contextualize the market of our time then with the tome Goodbye Gordon Gekko, How To Find Your Fortune Without Losing Your Soul. The book is a remarkably frank first hand tale from author and money manager Anthony Scaramucci, a successful investment banker who speaks from the heart in this easy-to-read page turner.
Mr. Scaramucci, himself the founder of an investment firm with $5.6 billion in assets, and who's spoken at conferences around the world, focuses on a positive message of shedding the greed mindset to replace it instead with a social good mechanism for surviving in today’s market mayhem. “It is up to us to approach life with the right attitude and positively react, not letting changes diminish our spirit or initiative or damage our personal reputation,” he writes. Continuing, he says “If we keep our values intact we will be fine regardless of what happens.” You have to wonder how far from this path Mark Zuckerberg has strayed in his passions to develop Facebook.
In the book, which is available on Amazon, he advocates: building a circle of competence made of those you trust, mentoring and celebrating others and giving back to your community and country, all the while targeting success. For the experienced author, who taps numerous first-hand accounts in the book, it means seeing capitalism as an art and businesses as creations and vocations, not simply as levers feeding your ego. Again, Mark…are you reading this? Anyone who’s seen the ‘fictionalized’ portrayal of events surrounding the creation of Facebook (kudos Aaron Sorkin) can see some interesting parallels.
Speaking from the inside, his experience at Goldman Sachs and Lehman brothers offer gripping accounts that are spelled out in simple terms in easy to understand vernacular. “Lehman had a group at the top who were tightly knit…they were loyal to the firm and to each other…and it was particularly hard for an outsider to break in.” Explaining the closed mentality there, he continues “these guys were protective of each other and the franchise…sometimes that tribal nature can help a firm…in the case of Lehman, however a lot of what killed the firm came from that very culture.”
More than a cautionary tale of greed, Goodby Gordon Gekko warmly recalls stories from Mr. Scaramucci’s youth and inexperience that paid deep dividends for him in life. There are stories we can all recall in our lives, and the idea is that there’s a cumulative-ness to our lives, that each person who touches us has a lesson to teach us; each experience has a meaning, these are our lives and we should be awake enough to live them with thoughtfulness. The fact that he too grew up on Long Island, somewhat near my own cousins, made this story all the more real for me.
I’ve been reading several books at once while paging through this book and its interesting that in addition to Goodbye Gordon Gekko, I’m reading Wayne Dyer’s “You’ll See it When You Believe It, the way to your personal transformation” along with Mike Dooley’s “Infinite Possibilities.” What’s remarkable is that each has a message of hope and inspiration, of reaching inside yourself to find yourself and meaning to our lives.
Mr. Scaramucci tells stories from each chapter in his life and imbues them with uniquely heartfelt meaning that is empathetic and enriching. It’s a pleasure to pick up. Have you seen the movie yet?
A PART II post here will be (I hope) some additional insights from the author himself (stay tuned).
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