my life is a series of wine flights
December 3, 2009, 2:55 am
i got stuck in the philly airport before thanksgiving and ended up at a wine bar with classmates. soon after, i realized that every career choice i’ve ever made is basically identical to how i choose to drink wine: every step of the way, i choose the option that allows me to keep my options open as much as possible.
at the bar, i drank three wine flights and one cheese flight. that’s 9 different kinds of wine. 9 different grapes. all of them were perfectly good
on the life side, the same phenomenon occurs. i went to michigan (so many good majors to choose from!), became a journalist (so many good topics to write about!), went to b-school (unlike med/law, so many options after graduation!), went to wharton (see michigan), and am now possibly considering consulting (see journalist and substitute “topics” and “write about” with “industries” and “work for,” respectively).
this is a problem. some of the people i was with at the airport actually bought full glasses. one guy got a whole bottle. these people make way more money than i do. there is some correlative effect going on here and i want to discover and conquer it.
did i just commit myself to being an investment banker?
Substitute “work for” with “rip off”. Please don’t do either of those things.
I think it’s more a matter of some people wanting to be specialists and some wanting to be generalists. I think there’s a term for this in the business world, but I can’t remember what it is. Basically, the idea is that some people are the broad, big stroke thinkers who dabble in lots of stuff and provide the overall goal and direction for a company, and then there are people who really want to focus narrowly on just one or two things and know those fields/skills really well. The former, rather than the latter, tend to be CEOs. Maybe that’s what’s going on with the wine.
why does it feel as if all the narrow people are gonna get jobs?
Supply and demand. I assume most people want to be the person running Coca-Cola. A much smaller number want to be the guy that specializes in procurement of corn syrup.
That said, I think our companies would be run much better if CEOs had more specialized skills so that they actually understand what’s going on in their companies. Dick Fuld, for instance, was a simple commercial paper trader (which is among the least technical of finance fields). He probably still couldn’t tell you what a CDO of ABS is.
Carl Ichan says the problem is that the guys that become CEOs are the non-so-bright former frat presidents that work their way up the ladder by not rocking the boat and being non-threatening:
http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/financial-markets/content/transcripts/transcript-15-guest-lecture-by-carl-icahn
Don’t go into banking. You could do so much better.