‘There is room at the top, they are telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill’ – John Lennon
I’m fairly sure Mr Lennon never set foot on the trading floor of a fully integrated investment bank, which makes his unerringly accurate appraisal of the principal skill required to succeed in the City all the more surprising.
Admittedly, not all Lennon’s teachings would have served an aspiring banker quite so well. Imagine all the people living life in peace strongly suggests he never attended a morning meeting during bonus season, while Give Peace a Chance is possibly the worst advice ever offered to an ambitious investment banker. I tried it once and the little bastard sitting next to me nicked my client.
But on smiling while you kill, John was bang on the money. I know this because I recently subjected myself to a clinical assessment by renowned forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes to establish something I’d increasingly begun to suspect while researching my latest book, How to Con Friends and Manipulate People – that I was, as my wife had occasionally mooted, a borderline psychopath.
My suspicions were magnified by the fact that journalists and podcast hosts alike had begun treating what I thought was a parody self-help book as my autobiography. The Times article I wrote was headlined ‘I was a City Boy psychopath’, while my appearance on Andrew Gold’s hugely popular Heretics podcast was titled ‘He knows how psychopaths manipulate you – he’s one of them’. I had, to use the fashionable phrase, completely lost control of the narrative… and, just as annoyingly, my wife was now able to tell me, ‘I told you so’.
Jude Edginton
However, the disappointing conclusion from Kerry’s diagnostic assessment was ‘no’, which naturally came as a bit of a blow. I’ve always been fairly competitive and, having spent the best part of two years researching psychopathy and identifying an impressive number of the relevant traits in myself, being told I hadn’t made the grade felt rather like expecting a knighthood and receiving a Duke of Edinburgh Bronze Award.
Daynes’s actual conclusion, however, was intriguing. While I apparently lack the psychological hardware required to become a Hannibal Lecter or, indeed, a Gordon Ramsay, she reckoned I could “dial up certain Dark Triad personality traits when the situation demands it”. More interestingly, she suggested this had been rather good news for my career as an equity specialist salesman because “the City directly rewards Dark Triad behaviour” – e.g. psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism.
She knows more about this than most because certain investment banks have used her diagnostic skills to help inform their recruitment processes. She told me that, “Occupational psychologists use psychometric tests to identify ‘dark side’ personality traits or ‘derailers’ that tend to emerge under pressure,” Rather than eliminating them entirely, banks seek a sweet spot – e.g. enough boldness, low anxiety, risk appetite and emotional detachment – to produce confident, resilient decision-makers, but not so much that these traits tip into recklessness or unethical behaviour. Apparently, my personality type was in this “sweet spot for success”.
Take my ‘emotional detachment’ and ‘lack of empathy’. There are obvious drawbacks to having too little empathy if your chosen career is presenting Blue Peter, but investment banking is different. Markets are remarkably efficient machines for transferring money from people who panic to those who don’t. Trading floors, likewise, tend to reward those who can keep their heads while everybody else is losing theirs.
I discovered fairly early on in my career that I was pretty good at this. A share we had recommended as our key Buy, Scottish Power, collapsed in November 2000, and certain clients began screaming down the phone that my recommendation had cost them a fortune. But within two minutes of putting the phone down, my pulse would be back to normal. This wasn’t because I couldn’t understand why the client was upset; I just didn’t feel any great need to join him.
The same detachment helped with rejection. Being a sell-side analyst is essentially being a vastly overpaid double-glazing salesman with a Reuters terminal. You spend much of your working day trying to persuade fund managers to listen to you while 15 other Oxbridge-educated double-glazing salesmen are doing precisely the same thing. If you take every unanswered call, rejected lunch invitation or client telling you that your latest piece of research is horseshit personally, you’d be an emotional wreck. You learn to regard ‘no’ not as a rejection but as a temporary inconvenience on the journey to ‘yes’.
Fearlessness is another trait that tends to crop up when psychologists discuss psychopathy. Too much of it in normal life can result in attempting to climb scaffolding after eight pints of Old Thumper, but a controlled dose is enormously useful in finance. My City career was essentially an escalating series of potentially cataclysmic situations which engendered in me only one reaction: what’s the worst that can happen? I suspect this gung-ho philosophy also explains how I happily spent my last two years in banking writing an anonymous whistleblower newspaper column that would have got me fired for gross misconduct had I been discovered. Many of the people around me had better degrees, greater technical knowledge and infinitely superior spreadsheets. What they didn’t necessarily possess was my inability to give much of a shit.
Markets are remarkably efficient machines for transferring money from people who panic to those who don’t.
That lack of anxiety was particularly useful when presenting to clients. Obviously, competence matters in finance – if you think ROCE is Chelsea’s new Brazilian striker, somebody will eventually notice – but once a minimum level has been achieved, confidence becomes enormously valuable because clients don’t merely buy information; they buy conviction.
There is a famous story about legendary dealmaker Bruce Wasserstein (whose firm Dresdner foolishly bought in 2001). Wasserstein was apparently addressing a room of senior officials about the dangers surrounding Slovakia’s privatisation programme, ignoring their increasingly frantic attempts to interrupt him. When he finally finished, there was an awkward pause before the Slovenian finance minister pointed out that he had spent the previous ten minutes discussing the wrong country. Without missing a beat, Bruce replied that he was merely illustrating how bad things were elsewhere so they could appreciate how much better off they were in Slovenia. Now, that really is weapons-grade bullshitability.
I became fairly good at selling certainty myself. That didn’t (always) mean deliberately lying to clients about companies’ prospects. It meant recognising that, once I’d done the work and reached a conclusion, advertising every doubt rattling around inside my head didn’t make me intellectually sophisticated; it just made me less persuasive. The City is stuffed with clever nerds suffering from imposter syndrome who insert a dozen caveats into every recommendation. A modest dose of narcissism here deals with this problem beautifully.
Another useful characteristic is not giving too much of a toss what everybody else thinks. Groupthink is comforting and safe, but it’s not terribly valuable if your job is to produce differentiated investment ideas. If 20 analysts already have a Buy recommendation on a stock and you produce the 21st, you may be right, but nobody is going to feel a strong need to pay you hundreds of thousands of pounds for the privilege.
Jude Edginton
The best example from my own career was British Energy. We had a strong Sell on the stock in 2000 and everyone else had it as a strong Buy. We had just started at a new bank and the shares almost doubled within months of our call. For the best part of that year, we looked like complete buffoons and came perilously close to being laughed off the stage by our own salesforce, who were literally pleading with us to change tack. But we stuck to our guns because we believed the company was essentially bankrupt and eventually – funnily enough, after it went bankrupt – the market came round to our view.
There is, of course, a fine line between brave independent thinking and being that swivel-eyed muppet in the pub who insists the moon landings were filmed in Abergavenny. Telling a client that the market – in other words, almost everyone else – is wrong requires big spuds. But if your job is to tell clients something they can’t get elsewhere (e.g. ‘adding value’), occasionally standing on your own is actually the point.
Then we come to the murkier matter of manipulation. Much of my job involved persuading extremely intelligent people to do things that happened to be financially advantageous to me. I wanted fund managers to come to my meetings, give my bank lots of commission and, most importantly, vote for me in the external surveys that determined analyst rankings and thus, ultimately, our bonuses.
I therefore became pretty adept at working out what made individual clients tick. One fund manager wanted detailed financial models, another wanted market gossip, while another preferred a four-hour lunch at Pétrus followed by observing ‘artistic dancers’ plying their trade at an avant-garde establishment called Ye Olde Axe. My memory has always been appalling, so remembering exactly who liked what was difficult. The solution was a comprehensive spreadsheet detailing everything from a client’s dog’s name to his preferred form of intoxication. It sounds horribly cynical written down, but it worked. Sales is partly about knowing your product, but it’s also about knowing the person you’re selling it to – and thus the most efficient way to persuade/manipulate him.
The darker skills were arguably even more useful with colleagues, particularly once autumn arrived and the City entered its annual festival of goodwill, AKA bonus season. The bonus system taught me one of the most useful lessons of my career: doing your job brilliantly is only part of the gig. The more important part is ensuring the right people know you’ve done it brilliantly. Young employees are often advised to put their heads down and trust that their efforts will eventually be recognised. This is charming advice but is generally dispensed by people who want to ensure their underlings don’t get a decent slice of the bonus pool. Your work does not speak for itself, and optics tend to matter more than reality.
You learn to regard ‘no’ not as a rejection but as a temporary inconvenience on the journey to ‘yes’.
If I’d made a great stock call, won over an important client or received some flattering feedback, I had very little compunction about subtly ensuring my boss was aware. The analyst surveys mattered even more because lazy headhunters used them when filling jobs, which meant your conveniently overheard fake conversations with headhunters just before B-day (designed to suggest you were ‘in demand’) sounded vaguely plausible.
By the latter stages of my career, I was running the second-highest-ranked equity team in London. This was most certainly not because I was the second most fabulous analyst in London. I was OK at my ‘official’ job, but I was better at making sure clients remembered what we’d done for them when the voting forms arrived – be it getting them not to invest in British Energy or having a thrilling experience with ‘Ebony’ in the VIP room at Spearmint Rhino.
Which is why I find Daynes’s assessment so interesting. Some corporate books tell young employees they should be empathetic, modest, cautious and collaborative. All admirable characteristics if you want to finish your career with a modest pension and a touching card from HR. But look at what competitive organisations actually reward: confidence, resilience, fearlessness, charm, risk-taking, persuasion, emotional control, an ability to ignore criticism, independence from groupthink and enough narcissism to believe that, out of all the ferociously ambitious people in the building, you deserve the top job.
Those ‘qualities’ have an uncomfortable amount in common with traits associated with psychopathy, which might help explain why one study found that 21 per cent of the 261 corporate leaders it assessed displayed clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits.
Your work does not speak for itself, and optics tend to matter more than reality.
The crucial issue is not simply whether you possess some of these less-than-pleasant characteristics, but whether you can turn them on and off at the appropriate moment. Calculated ruthlessness in a bonus negotiation may help your career but will likely prove less advisable when discussing your marriage. Emotional detachment can prevent you panicking when a trade goes wrong, but permanent emotional detachment will mean your divorce lawyer will most likely become your closest friend. A little narcissism gets you noticed – but too much gives you the sudden urge to start a podcast.
Aspiring bankers don’t actually need to become psychopaths; they merely need access to the toolkit. The trick is being able to put the toolkit back in the cupboard after you’ve charmed clients and impressed your boss so you can go home, hug your children – and occasionally even allow your wife to win an argument.
John Lennon, it turns out, was only half right. If you want to reach the top, you may occasionally have to smile as you kill.
But unless you want to end up like Ted Bundy, it’s probably wise to stop the smiling (and killing) as soon as you leave the office.
For more highly questionable career advice and observations on the City that HR would rather you didn’t read, follow Geraint ‘Cityboy’ Anderson on Instagram. How to Con Friends and Manipulate People is out now.
