Book Review: Liar's Poker

Money Talks

This is a book that I was reading for a second time and it was just as enjoyable as when I read it for the first time almost 10 years ago. The book primarily traces the rise and fall of Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. For those of you who are in the high world of finance this a must read given that it is the story of the heady days of Wall Street in the 1980s when Michael Milkin paid himself a whopping $550 million bonus one year, not to mention the very interesting game that lends its name to the title of the book.

I am not a high-finance type and therefore what cuts it for me in this book though is the way Michael Lewis describes students preparing for job interviews, training sessions, the politics of organisations, the insecurities of managers and the smug self-righteousness that all firms profess to have. For anyone who has worked as a manager anywhere in the world the entire situation is totally relatable and makes for engaging reading. He makes the point rather tellingly that there is no such thing as a win-win in business. If you are winning then someone out there is losing. Though he never says it in these many words he does suggest that ethics in business is at best a strategic weapon or a convenient ploy when you find yourself at the short end of the stick.

And that is something that I identify with. As far as I am concerned nothing amuses me more than this debate on ethics in organisations and whether ethics can and should be taught at business schools and such other crap.

We all know that management has legitimised all kinds of subversions under the name of strategy. A hundred years ago if you were fighting a war and switched sides you would have been called a traitor. Today managers who defect from one company to another (armed with diskettes, cds etc) are welcomed as heroes. If you stabbed a man in the back you were called a coward but corporations thump their chests when they indulge in such action calling it ambush marketing. I do believe that hundreds of years from now people will dig up the graves of managers and hang their skeletons on flagpoles and point us out and say "These were the bastards who legitimised all kinds of shady behaviour by calling it strategy. They are the fuckers who mades treachery, cowardice, avarice, traitorous behaviour, acceptable by giving a positive spin."

Coming back to the book Michael Lewis also brings out rather well how most organisations made it because they took risks but once they succeed they invariably want to reduce risk by hiring far more selectively, relying in models rather than gut and therein cede their advantage to younger more entrepreneurial firms. He also deals with the subject of money and how it becomes an obsession for high flying managers who tend to measure their worth in terms of what they earn.

I guess the first time I read the book I was young and wanted to be a big swinging dick (what high flying managers in Salomon were called) and was perhaps a tad disappointed by what I perceived as Lewis’ cynicism at the end of the book. Maybe I am wiser now or maybe I am just too old but this time the ending just seems more apt.