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Tearing Down the Walls, How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World… and Then Nearly Lost It All (Paperback)
by Monica Langley
| Category:
Biography, Corporate history, Banking, Business |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
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¥ 148.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A most realistic biography of Sandy Weill and the history of City Bank. |
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Author: Monica Langley
Publisher: Free Press
Pub. in: April, 2004
ISBN: 0743247264
Pages: 480
Measurements: 8.1 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00052
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- Awards & Credential -
A New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. |
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- MSL Picks -
Probably as interesting as the story of Weill's rise to the top of the financial world is his personality: Tearing Down the Walls charts the ascent of Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill, from lowly brokerage clerk to master of a globe-straddling financial empire. What emerges is a picture of a man who is fiercely ambitious and terrifyingly astute - but also seriously flawed.
Prone to fits of rage, Weill regularly unleashes streams of expletives on petrified subordinates, sometimes reducing them to tears. He is quick to punish close lieutenants foolish enough to evince the slightest bit of disloyalty. And his laser-like focus on cost-cutting tends to sow disaffection among employees.
But he is also something of an enigma. Despite his fearsome temper, he has a tremendous capacity for empathy, often moved to tears upon learning of the plight of others. Shy and unassertive in his early days, he later metamorphoses into a self-assured and forceful leader.
Langley is a skilled raconteur and her silken prose is a pleasure to read. Her ability to glean the finer details of Weill's life is also impressive. Without a doubt, this is one of the best business books of the year. (From quoting an American reader)
Target readers:
Executives, managers, entrepreneurs, banking, investment and finance professionals, government officials, academics, and MBAs.
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Monica Langley has written for The Wall Street Journal for twelve years. Her investigative reports on a wide array of subjects have regularly appeared on the Journal's front page. Formerly a practicing attorney for eight years, she lives with her husband and daughter in New York City.
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From the Publisher:
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Tearing Down the Walls features a provocative new chapter about the scandals gripping Wall Street and the dramatic showdowns that changed how business is down.
He is one of the world's most accomplished figures of modern fiancé. As chairman and chief executive officer of Citigroup, Sandford "Sandy" Weill has become an American legend, a banking visionary whose innovativeness, opportunism, and even fear drove him from the lowliest jobs on Wall Street to its most commanding heights. In this unprecedented biography, Monica Langley provides a compelling account of Weill's rise to power. What emerges is a portrait of a man who is as vital and as volatile as the market itself.
Tearing Down the Walls tells the riveting inside story of how a Jewish boy from Brooklyn's back alleys overcame incredible odds and deep-seated prejudices to transform the financial services industry as we know today.
Using nearly 500 firsthand interviews with key players in Weill's life and career – including Weill himself – Langley brilliantly chronicles not only his success and scandals but also the shadows of his hidden self – his father's abandonment and his loving marriage, his tyrannical rages as well as his tearful regrets; his fierce sense of loyalty and his ruthless elimination of potential rivals. By highlighting in new and startling detail one man's life in a narrative as richly textured and compelling as a novel, Tearing Down the Walls provides the historical context of the dramatic changes not only in business but also in American society in the last half century.
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Chapter 1: Crashing the Gates
At age twenty-two, when most young men are eagerly laying plans for their careers, Sandy Weill was facing failure. In one shattering night the future that he had thought would be his had utterly evaporated. His dreams of joining the family business were in ruins, his beloved mother was suddenly facing life alone, his classmates would soon be graduating without him, and the woman he desperately wanted to marry was being told to dump him. All because his father, Max Weill, went out for cigarettes one night and didn't come back.
For Sandy, the pain of failure was all the worse for how hard and long he had struggled to achieve even a smattering of success. As a child growing up in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, short and chubby Sandy was an easy target for the bullies who often sent him scurrying to his mother's protective skirts. Shy and reclusive, he made no close friends at school and stood in fear and awe of his handsome, ebullient father, Max, who often scolded Sandy for not being more rough and tumble and not standing up for himself. His only real friend was his little sister, Helen, who worshiped her brother. During summers at their grandparents' farm, Sandy would dig worms so that he and Helen could fish in the pond and then dutifully bait her hook and remove any wriggling fish she caught. But even with her, Sandy kept his feelings to himself. The two could sit together for hours listening to New York Yankees games on the radio without exchanging a word.
All that began to change when fourteen-year-old Sandy was enrolled at the Peekskill Military Academy, a boarding school near his grandparents' farm. The school emphasized both sports and scholarship and kept students' days full of activities. At five feet nine inches Sandy was too small for the football team, but much to his own surprise, he honed his tennis skills, acquired during earlier summer camps, to win many school tournaments. He became captain of Peekskill's tennis team and even played in the Junior Davis Cup. The physical regimen of calisthenics every morning and sports every afternoon melted away some of the baby fat. At the same time Sandy realized he liked learning and was good at it. He would bang out his homework assignments in an hour or two and then nag his roommate, Stuart Fendler, to finish his assignments so the two could head for the school canteen for ice cream. Yet while excelling at both sports and academics, Sandy never became a leader on campus or even a very popular student. At graduation, when seniors predicted what would become of their classmates, no one predicted Sandy would do anything exceptional. He told classmates he planned to join his father's steel-importing business. In a school skit, Sandy even cast himself as the owner of Super Deluxe Steel Plating Co., with five plants across the country.
Max Weill's inaptly named American Steel Co. - it dealt almost exclusively in imported steel - was his second business venture. Like many young Jewish men whose parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe, Max first went into the rag trade, where his good looks, flirtatious ways, and free spending won him a strong clientele as a dressmaker. Etta Kalika, whom Max married in 1932, couldn't have been more different. Plain, conservative, and thrifty, Etta refused to wear the fancy clothes Max brought her and preferred to spend her time visiting her parents, who lived downstairs from Max and Etta in a three-family home the parents owned, and caring for her two children, Sandy and Helen. While the dressmaking business was successful, Max Weill, who treated himself to a weekly haircut and manicure, was always on the lookout for the next big opportunity. One opportunity he found - to violate wartime price-gouging regulations - earned him a $10,000 fine and a suspended prison sentence and prompted him to leave dressmaking for good. After an abortive move to Miami during the war, Max and Etta were back in Brooklyn by 1945, this time in the Flatbush neighborhood, and Max had set up American Steel.
Sandy's outstanding academic record at Peekskill opened the doors of prestigious Cornell University where, true to his intentions to join his father's business, he declared a major in metallurgical engineering. But as so many college freshmen discover, college is about a lot more than classes. With thirteen Jewish fraternities eager to sign up new pledges, Sandy found himself a hot property. AEPi was particularly interested in recruiting him, and Sandy wanted to make a good impression. The composure and confidence - or at least the appearance of it - developed in military school, as well as the free-flowing alcohol, helped him overcome his innate shyness. Though never comfortable in social settings, he found he could be sociable and even charming. His tennis skills, applied to the game of table tennis, impressed the fraternity brothers.
Once AEPi accepted him, Sandy fell into a common pattern: alcohol and parties at night, missed classes in the morning, and weekends full of dates. By Thanksgiving of his freshman year Sandy was on probation and realized that the rigors of metallurgical engineering were not conducive to his new lifestyle. A switch to Cornell's liberal-arts program enabled him to resuscitate his grade-point average without making a serious dent in his heavy schedule of dating, eating, and drinking. Indeed, it was during his freshman year that Sandy began to indulge what would become a lifelong passion: food. Sandy and his frequent Ping-Pong partner Lenny Zucker, who shared Sandy's obsession with eating, would plan weekends around where they were going to eat. It helped that Sandy had a car, a new yellow Pontiac convertible, and a credit card, both supplied by his father. Yet he wasn't extravagant. On the way to pick up their dates for a dinner at a famous Finger Lakes restaurant, Sandy warned Zucker to let the girls order first. "They'll order the liver, the cheapest thing on the menu, and then we can have steaks," a prediction that turned out to be dead on.
Despite his shortish stature and less-than-suave manners, Sandy had more than his fair share of dates at Cornell. He was especially adept at spotting and romancing the Cornell coeds who came from moneyed families. But when he was twenty-one and visiting home during his junior year, his aunt Mabel, a self-professed matchmaker, told her nephew about Joan Mosher, a student at Brooklyn College who lived with her parents in Aunt Mabel's neighborhood of Woodmere, Long Island. Overcoming an initial bout of shyness, Sandy telephoned Joan and came away from the call convinced he really wanted to meet this woman. Their first date, April Fool's Day, 1954, ended in the wee hours of the next morning as the two found one thing after another to talk about. Smitten, Sandy vowed to friends that he was going to marry Joan Mosher and, true to that pledge, he never dated anyone else. Joan's gracious poise, empathetic manner, and tall, slender figure were an irresistible package to the Brooklyn boy who was just about the opposite - awkward, short, and stocky with a cockiness that tended to hide his shyness. To be closer to her, Sandy would spend weekends with his aunt Mabel, sleeping on her sofa during the few hours he wasn't with Joan. Joan's family lived in a new upscale development in Woodmere, in an upper-middle-class home with a large yard. Her father, Paul, was in public relations, and the family lived in a country-club milieu that Sandy had never experienced. While the Moshers didn't directly object to Sandy, it wasn't hard for Sandy to recognize that they weren't thoroughly pleased that Joan was getting serious with someone who didn't seem to be as ambitious or as polished as they might have liked.
While his brief foray into metallurgical engineering ended in near disaster, Sandy still intended to join his father's business. With that certain opportunity ahead, he thought little about career planning, unlike friends who were aiming for law school or joining professionally oriented groups on campus. He continued to coast through school, posting reasonable grades in easy courses while spending as much time with Joan as he could. By spring of 1955 the young couple began planning an elaborate wedding to be held shortly after Sandy graduated.
Then Max Weill sprang his stunning surprise. Leaving the house on the pretext of going for a pack of cigarettes, Max phoned his unsuspecting wife to tell her he had long been having an affair with a younger woman and now he intended to divorce Etta and marry his lover. Reeling, all Etta could think to do was call her son. The news floored Sandy. He had known his parents were very different from each other, but he had never even considered the possibility that they might divorce. As soon as he recovered his wits, Sandy jumped into his convertible, sped off to pick up his sister at Smith College in western Massachusetts, and then drove through the night to confront Max, who was living with his mistress. It was only then, as he and Helen tried desperately to convince Max to come home, that his father struck a second shocking blow: He had secretly sold American Steel months earlier. There was no steel business and no job for Sandy.
Defeated and despondent, Sandy returned to Cornell. His family was disintegrating before his eyes, and his long-held dream of setting up as a prosperous steel importer had evaporated, literally overnight. Yet more was in store. While he and Helen were comforting their mother in Brooklyn, Sandy missed a crucial exam in his accounting class. The professor wouldn't listen to explanations or excuses, and suddenly the shaken senior didn't have enough credits to graduate with his class. Joan's parents seized on the crisis as ammunition to foil the pending wedding. Their daughter's suitor wouldn't have a college degree. Worse, his parents were divorcing in a scandalous affair. "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree," Paul Mosher warned his daughter before offering her a trip to Europe if she wouldn't marry Sandy.
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| View all 9 comments |
James B. Stewart (author of Den of Thieves) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
At last, the defining business book of the decade is here. Sandy Weill emerges as not just the most compelling character on Wall Street today but a King Lear-like figure of towering ego, voracious appetite, and ruthless ambition that embodies the transformative power of American capitalism. The behind-the-scenes reporting is unparalleled, placing the reader in top-secret board meetings, lunches at the Four Seasons, and on board the corporate jets where real financial power is wielded. As fresh as today's scandal-filled headlines, Tearing Down the Walls is also a meticulously detailed history and a powerful narrative that grips the reader right up to the revelations of its final pages. |
Ken Auletta (author of Greed and Glory on Wall Street) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
Monica Langley has written what will surely be a contender for the best business book of 2003. Tearing Down the Walls is like a Chinese menu in which the reader is offered everything from Column A and B – a vivid biography of Wall Street titan Sandy Weill, an illuminating history of Wall Street, an inside-the-executive-suite look at how decisions are made, an explanation of why corporate America is sometimes ethically obtuse, a book that is anchored in fact yet reads like a novel. And like a Chinese meal, readers will feel full hours later. |
Bryan Burrough (coauthor of Barbarians at the Gate) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
No single figure looms larger in Wall Street history over the last 30 years than Sandy Weill, and until now no single book captures the his boundless energy, street-savvy intellect, and towering ambition. More than a riveting narrative of one man's relentless climb to the top of the financial world, Tearing Down the Walls is also a fascinating chronicle of how Wall Street changed in the 90s. Any business person interested in the current world of finance will want to devour the book now, and I suspect it will be mandatory reading on trading floors and in business school for years to come. |
Chris Kuhns (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
This book could be considered a corner stone foundation marker in understanding what makes people relevant, even when they are not.
Sandy Weill shows how consistency and planning directed to delivering real value for others will result in producing positive results. Monica Langley describes well how a strong basis in fundamental value wins over adversity and fills in a vacuum.
The book does a good job in reflecting the transition from family to business and the process of creating an icon that Sandy Weill became with his challenges as a broker, American Express, Travelers and Citibank. As a reader, you can see how these companies needed Sandy's pivotal instincts to solve their problems and evolve. |
View all 9 comments |
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