UP CLOSE AND ALL IN

The former CEO of Morgan Stanley chronicles his life in the financial trenches.

Mack (b. 1944) opens on a fierce note: At a company gathering, a fellow trader made a poor fellow delivering his breakfast wait for half an hour while, presumably, he slept in. As the author writes, he “tore into him. ‘Who do you think you are? This guy is trying to do exactly what you do: make a living. When you keep him waiting, you’re taking money out of his pocket. Do this again and I’ll fire you.’ ” Mack recounts plenty of hiring and firing, the latter almost always for cause but sometimes in the apparent interest of shaking things up to try something different. “Giving anyone a fiefdom is a terrible idea,” he writes, sagely. Though the author admits there is inherent recklessness in the business, that’s no excuse to be inhuman. “This is a real lesson: don’t avoid the hard things or the difficult people,” he writes, both of which will in turn teach future lessons. Hard lessons came with the financial meltdown of 2008, which found Mack resisting calls from the federal government to merge while staring down the possibility of a complete economic collapse. Instead, the author quickly recruited Japanese investors to shore up the company and avoid the chaos that killed other financial institutions, a deal that had the mixed blessing of bringing tighter federal oversight over Morgan Stanley while giving what was now a holding company “permanent access to the Fed lending window.” The ideal reader for much of Mack’s book will be business wonks or those pursuing an MBA, but the author’s common-sensical approach to matters both financial and personal, while familiar, is worth pondering, as when he counsels, “Making the hard calls when you have no idea of the outcome—taking the risk, putting yourself out there—that’s when you prove your mettle.”

A refreshingly straightforward, plainspoken look at what happens on the trading floor and in the boardroom.