The banker and the leader

(Pardon my Englsih...)
It’s my first book of Authur Hailey, but knowing he has other books like Hotel, Airport and Strong Medicine, you can’t help but wonder, how he managed to pick an industry and write about it in such details, let alone to blend it with amazing plots.
As many said, it’s a great introduction to the financial world, at least for people like me who knows absolute nothing about banking, business, finance…etc. The book was first published in 1975, yet what he said such as credit card abuse, using tomorrow’s money to pursue today’s “dreams”, debit crisis, printing us dollars, the devaluation of us dollars, the inflation, the gold standard and the monetary system…seem really familiar today, no? Besides, like a reader said about the automatic teller machine with a controlling center far away, at that time the internet hadn’t even hit our world.
Despite a lot of suspension, it’s not only a story about a power fight or the good versus the evil. The further I read, the more “human” every character seemed to me, with a human being’s flesh and blood, with their own life, own flaws, worries, concerns and ambitions. (Stop here if you haven’t read the book.) You can’t simply judge them as good or bad, right or wrong, just as you won’t feel anything like “he deserves it” when you read about Miles’s miserable experience in prison (btw. how did you come up with this mr hailey? Straight then gay then straight again?) or Heywood’s jumping from the balcony. Greed or what, that’s part of human nature that we all have, and it makes people more real. I guess that’s also why Miles becomes my favorite character, flawed yet maintains the courage and integrity.
As for Heywood and Vandervoort, I couldn’t help relating them to Tal’s open course of leadership psychology while I was reading, hence the title.
I remember at the beginning of the book, when Heywood was canvassing over telephone after Ben Rosseli’s death, one board director (I don’t remember who) said to Heywood that he’s never a leader. It really makes sense. Heywood is all about maximizing profit, which a businessman naturally does. But Vandervoort is more a keeper of the bank’s core value.
Heywood is more about himself, his position and authority in the bank and Vandervoort more about the bank as a whole. Just look at how Vandervoort insisted on objecting the supernational loan which would obviously isolate him from the board and Heywood’s jealousy when he saw Vandervoort’s success at the bank run.
That’s what differentiates the great from the good, and makes Vandervoort a leader while Heywood only a successful banker and businessman at best.
There were two decisions of Vandervoort that impressed me a lot and I agree with him on both. One was when he was discussing the expansion of savings and loan and the opening of new branches before the board and surprisingly gained Austin’s support, and knowing almost immediately Austin’s true purpose, he didn’t object. The other was that conversation with the old man at the bank run. Both these two decisions seem to be based on violation of principles such as honesty in the latter case. That’s what makes choices so tough. It’s easy to choose between right and wrong but it’s difficult to choose between right and right, knowing that whichever you choose, people get hurt. A wise decision would be not to choose but a leader chooses. You can’t lead with purity, without getting your hands dirty. And how to choose depends on your hierarchy of values. (sorry for turning it into notes of the course…)
Anyway it’s a good read. It was hard to put it down even reading in English.