My Very Best Career Move

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Because it was a village called Zhombe and it was in Zimbabwe, I had arrived, alphabetically speaking, at the end of the world. And it was the best career decision I had ever made.

In 1991, I was hired by the San Francisco branch office of a major Wall Street firm (since defunct) while I was completing my MBA in finance in the evenings.

Working with government bond salesmen (they were all men), my stated job was administrative support. My real job was to watch and listen and learn.

A couple of years later, degree in hand, I was promoted to an analyst position at their New York headquarters. And so, I was on my way…

Wall Street in the early to mid-nineties was on the heels of the previous decade’s introduction of Gordon Gekko and leveraged buy-outs to the public discourse, and just before the glamorous rise and fall of dot-coms.

Wall Streeters were not regarded as the “good guys.”

But then, as now, there was some amount of public fascination with the prominent personalities.

And the money, of course. (Much less of it then than now, but still…)