Conference, Day One

I got back from the team offsite conference just a few hours ago. It was interesting finally getting to meet the rest of the team in Melbourne and New Zealand, as well as a lot of other people from other units (Credit, Syndications etc) who I have spoken to on the phone regularly but haven't properly met face-to-face.

The two-day conference went well enough. The first day was essentially the "team building" day and the second was the "strategy" day. Some observations which I thought were relevant or amusing:

Double Agent
With the right type of information and appealing incentives, mistrust and accusations skyrocket at the slightest hint of unexpected behaviour. The "right type of information", of course, being a lie.

Weak Links
Team-building activities tend to have the ironic effect of revealing that, as much as we like to think that we work best as coordinated teams, we can actually derive just as much value by being a loose collaboration of individual performers.

Too many cooks
Having two Global Heads, plus a known extrovert, in your corporate games team is a surefire way to see a leadership struggle unfold.

Does this mean anything Part I
I was in the same team as the Global Kahuna of Leveraged Finance, and the Global Head of Syndications. In the first game we played, they both participated, and we lost. In the second game we played, we were running behind halfway through the game; but then both Global Heads left during the game to take phone calls. The team (sans Heads) managed to catch up and almost steal the second game.

Does this mean anything Part II
There were six games played all up. We won two games: one involved throwing bags at numbers, the other involved finding and touching scattered numbered cards in ascending order. In classic Rockett Fuel geekdom-inspired dry humour, I went up to the Global Kahuna after winning the last game and deadpanned: "So we can win games that involve numbers." It was the first time he laughed during the games.

I overheard him repeating my lame joke at the bar later that night.

Unsure if this is a compliment or a hex
Global Kahuna talking to Director, No Credit: "There's two really hard workers in our team; Rockett Fuel is one of them."

On that note, I will keep my mobile turned off during my London holidays.

Serendipity?
My new line manager (after my previous one left to join the Dark Side), on me securing a seat at the geek table that just happened to have all the bigwigs in it: "Nice work getting into the head table."

Not that I planned it; when I walked into the dining room, I was just thinking "crap, I forgot my glasses. Now I have to sit at the front".

The relatively more informative Day Two commentary will be posted later.

Frustration

One of the frustrating aspects of my job is that, because we are the key point for the transaction, all the peripherals that were previously attached or have since been attached to our transaction becomes MY problem. Disregard the fact that the silly bilateral facility out to a tiny JV in south Kazhakstan is 0.000001% the size of the leveraged transaction I continue to manage (God knows why when we can easily be free of the problem for 70c on the dollar). The seemingly harmless note that it is unsecured is enough to send the Credit Chain Gang into a frenzy, and demand reams of useless information simply so they can "assess" whether it's better to demand refinance of the pimple facility now (assuring no payment and the ire of the borrower), or give them 30 days to do it. Geez guys do you really need the 5-year forecast to make a decision?

In other news, I continue to lose money on all the stocks that I have not yet been banned from trading. Which unfortunately consists almost entirely of financial stocks, because our silly "Four Pillars" policy and the fact that no one wants to touch them with a barge pole virtually guarantees no deals... for now.

Career-wise, we have had some pretty heavy losses - a very experienced director has switched to the Dark Side (PE), and another manager has gone to the Land of the Long Lunch (Syndications). Interesting since finance is supposed to be seeing a slowdown in hiring. There is now an unofficial ranking table on the biggest flight risks in the office, which would probably work better if people weren't such rampant liars about the interviews they are going to.

For what it was worth, I told my new director exactly what had been discussed with my old one, where I thought I was heading, by when, and my key development points before the deadline. It is an unfortunate irony that, while every team would love to have a stable core, in reality it creates serious problems of its own. Excluding our graduate/model monkey, everyone on the team has been there around 15-18 months or more. Naturally, this bunch of overachievers will all be angling for promotions by end of the year. In a high-octane, tight-knit group, promoting one person over another will inevitably cause serious disruption to the team's chemistry. It makes for a very interesting analysis of the Flight Risk Table rankings. It would be funny, I think, to find out that someone believes my eerily normal behaviour, coupled by steadily increasing number of coffees per week, translates to multiple interviews each week. (My coffee meetings are all legitimate business, by the way.) Overanalysis is fun to watch.

I will be off to London in a couple of weeks for some R&R. Hoping to catch up with old friends, I'm sure some of them will have plenty of time to spare, given the wrath of Bernstein's Gods is on a rampage over there. I will of course endeavour to get a feel for the situation there (as much as I can get a feel for in between pints of beer, anyway), and write about it here. See how we go!

Death and reanimation

RIP Bear Stearns. One day, when the "behind the scenes" book about your demise is written, it will sit proudly next to my copy of "When Genius Failed". Delicious irony.

Anyway, Rockett Fuel is alive and relatively well, and will AGAIN try to blog more regularly. I just had to mark the occasion.