Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst Read Online Free PDF Page A

doing in the middle of this?
    Already, I’d ventured pretty far from my beginnings as the son of a scrap-metal dealer with a high school education. I’d been a political science major and math minor at the State University of New York at Albany, where I’d met my wife-to-be, Paula Zimmer, during a Wiffle ball game on the first day of our second year. She studied art history and then went back to school to become a pediatric-intensive-care nurse. And I’d gone on to become a starry-eyed graduate student of Middle East politics at the University of Chicago and Princeton University, certain I wanted to devote my life to bringing peace to that powder keg of a region.
    I ended up at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, earning a master’s degree in 1979. I was hoping for an assignment that involved foreign policy but instead accepted a $24,000 offer from Coopers & Lybrand, one of the world’s largest accounting and consulting firms, as an economic consultant in its Washington, D.C., office. For a few years, I was really happy at Coopers. The job appealed to my inner wonk, and I worked my way up the food chain. But once I was promoted to manager, my job became more and more about selling new consulting services to clients. The whole selling thing turned me off. I didn’t want my life to be defined by the spin and hype of selling. Working inside a growing company began to sound a lot more interesting.
    From Consulting to Communications: MCI
    It just so happened that the Coopers’s D.C. office building backed up against the new offices of MCI, an upstart telecommunications company that had been in business since 1968. MCI had emerged as a young, exciting David to AT&T, the ultimate corporate Goliath, with a more responsive, entrepreneurial culture. Its founder, Bill McGowan, had found a way to compete against AT&T in the long distance market even before the November 1982 court order that would break up the monopoly Bell system into AT&T and seven companies that became known as the Baby Bells. MCI had grown wildly in the early 1980s, quadrupling its sales to $400 million between 1979 and 1983.
    I knew a few former colleagues from Coopers who had gone over to MCI, and decided it sounded like a great opportunity. MCI made me an offer to work in its finance department, though it would mean a 10 percent pay cut from my current salary of $38,000 to $34,000 and the end of my rise up the Coopers & Lybrand partnership ladder. I talked it over with Paula, and although it was going to be tough for a while, she agreed that the potential to work at a fast-growing, dynamic company was worth giving up some salary in the short-term.
    Most of all, I wanted out of anything to do with sales and marketing. Iwas a cerebral type who liked reasoning through complex issues rather than trying to turn everything into a slogan or sales pitch. It would become a familiar refrain in my career, and an ironic one too. Every time I tried to escape the sales aspect of a job, I made a move that brought me closer to that world.
    But I didn’t know any of that then. I was 30, with a wife, a two-year-old daughter, and another baby on the way—no longer an idealist seeking world peace, but no cynical sellout either. So I started at MCI in 1983 as a capital-budget analyst, which essentially meant that I reviewed all the requests for money from around the company and recommended approval or rejection. It was a classic middle management job, but it was exciting work in a company like MCI. Within four years, I had become the senior manager of budgeting and planning, doing nuts-and-bolts financial stuff that was right up my alley. And then, in 1987, I got a call from Bill Conway, MCI’s wunderkind 36-year-old chief financial officer. He wondered whether I’d be interested in a job in the investor relations department as the liaison between MCI and the Wall Street analysts who now covered us.
    Every time a new industry came along, Wall Street