The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg
by Eleanor Randolph
Mike Bloomberg did not need to hire anybody, he insisted. There were no donors to appease, no supporters who had bargained their endorsement for some city favor. With such freedom, Bloomberg’s hires—with a few exceptions—would be the best that he and Leventhal believed they could find at the time.15 Bloomberg told reporters that he would not ask potential hires about party, even whether someone had worked for his opponents like Mark Green. And there would be no effort at diversity, he added. “I am not looking at race, ethnicity, gender, whatever.” In a key economic address at a breakfast given by Crain’s business magazine in October 2001, he began advising executives from the city’s top corporations to avoid hiring people from the suburbs. They are not “the best and the brightest,” he explained. “This is a self-selection process. People who want to go there [Connecticut or Westchester, for example] aren’t the people that you want to have in your company.”37 It might have hurt him with his richer suburban friends, but it sounded right to New Yorkers.
Almost everybody who talked about working closely with Bloomberg mentioned his view of loyalty. If you were loyal to him, he would be loyal to you, they said, almost as a mantra. And anyone who resigned from his company to work elsewhere was never to be hired again. There could be no going-away parties for someone who had committed his version of corporate treason.
“And he interrupts me. ‘Do you know the first rule of sales?’ ” Frieden shook his head, no. “ ‘Once you make the sale, leave. It happens all the time. A new salesman comes into the company, and he makes a sale. He’s so excited about it he starts talking to the customer and pretty soon the customer’s having second thoughts and they lose the sale.’ ”
Over the years, learning how to use the terminal allowed one to enter a kind of insider’s universe—one user compared it to the Star Trek language of Klingonese—but once you learned, you were so easily hooked that another extremely satisfied user would compare it to drugs. For traders, it was like a company “selling heroin.”
Based loosely on the Salomon Brothers system,15 Bloomberg gave each employee a share of the company’s profits for what he called Equity Equivalent Certificates, or EECs. These gifts, called simply “certs,” could usually be cashed out a year after they were granted—but you had to be working at Bloomberg to get the check.
Moreover, Bloomberg knew his strengths. And his weaknesses. “I’m not an investor. I’m not an analyst. I’m not a consultant. I’m not a teacher. I’m not a writer. I am an executive. I make decisions . . . in government, the president, the governor, and the mayor are executive jobs.”
"Mike Bloomberg did not need to hire anybody, he insisted. There were no donors to appease, no supporters who had bargained their endorsement for some city favor. With such freedom, Bloomberg’s hires—with a few exceptions—would be the best that he and Leventhal believed they could find at the time.15 Bloomberg told reporters that he would not ask potential hires about party, even whether someone had worked for his opponents like Mark Green. And there would be no effort at diversity, he added. “I am not looking at race, ethnicity, gender, whatever.”"
"In a key economic address at a breakfast given by Crain’s business magazine in October 2001, he began advising executives from the city’s top corporations to avoid hiring people from the suburbs. They are not “the best and the brightest,” he explained. “This is a self-selection process. People who want to go there [Connecticut or Westchester, for example] aren’t the people that you want to have in your company.”37 It might have hurt him with his richer suburban friends, but it sounded right to New Yorkers."
"Michael Bloomberg loved doing business over dinner. It was not idle time, those hours taken off to savor food and drink. And the talk was not usually about the food (even at his posh dinners, he served meat loaf or roast beef, barely one step up from the cafeteria specialties of his youth). Meals were a time to devour whatever was happening outside his cloistered world, to seek out experts in his big three interests—business, politics, and philanthropy."
"Bloomberg’s father worked most of his adult life as an accountant, earning just enough to support his family. (His son estimated his dad’s salary at $6,000.) If there is one memory of Mike’s father that made its most durable mark, William Bloomberg took some of those scarce dollars and donated them every year to the NAACP. When asked why, he said simply that “discrimination against one group is really discrimination against all groups.”"
"Instead, the mayor lowered his voice and explained that firing people is dangerous. It hurts the person who gets fired, of course, and he or she can then go off and bitch about the Bloomberg operation, even to the press. It also hurts the others who stay and fear that their loyalty to him is misplaced. Loyalty deserves loyalty, he said often, and that loyalty pact became early dogma at Bloomberg LP."
"Almost everybody who talked about working closely with Bloomberg mentioned his view of loyalty. If you were loyal to him, he would be loyal to you, they said, almost as a mantra. And anyone who resigned from his company to work elsewhere was never to be hired again. There could be no going-away parties for someone who had committed his version of corporate treason."
"“And he interrupts me. ‘Do you know the first rule of sales?’ ” Frieden shook his head, no. “ ‘Once you make the sale, leave. It happens all the time. A new salesman comes into the company, and he makes a sale. He’s so excited about it he starts talking to the customer and pretty soon the customer’s having second thoughts and they lose the sale.’ ”"
- →Over the years, learning how to use the terminal allowed one to enter a kind of insider’s universe—one user compared it to the Star Trek language of Klingonese—but once you learned, you were so easily hooked that another extremely satisfied user would compare it to drugs. For traders, it was like a company “selling heroin.”
- →He later wrote that “I’m sure someone, someplace is smart enough to succeed while ‘keeping it in perspective’ and not working too hard, but I’ve never met him or her. The more you work, the better you do. It’s that simple. I always outworked the other person.”
- →Mike Bloomberg would often blurt out exactly what was on his mind, then apologize later—a habit or tic that would cause him more trouble after he escaped the Wall Street of his day.
- →Bloomberg, who often said he loved Sunday nights because he could go to work the next day, continued to arrive shortly after daybreak, as a rule.
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