He was a bankruptcy lawyer for 15 years. Then, a client invited him to join a hedge fund. What is unique about his experience is that his substantive legal trainings have remained valuable. This is so because he places bets on the amount of money creditors can collect from a bankrupt company.
I am more and more convinced that bankruptcy is the practice area that requires the greatest amount of problem solving.
He came to law school because he got in and because he wanted to make his grandmother happy. Once here, he played ice hockey with Brian “Red” Burke, now GM of the Anaheim Ducks. When he found out that the b-school had a more organized hockey team, he applied there and graduated with a dual degree. Now he’s back for a lunch program as a distinguished alumnus.
His philosophy to life is easily understood. A line he borrowed from Drew Faust’s commencement speech describes it well. “Do not park your car twenty blocks from your destination. Drive and see if you can park in front of the building you are going to.” After graduation, he did a sort of an apprenticeship in real estate in New York. Then, he went to Europe and built something from scratch. His thesis is that differentiation is king. Cultural arbitrage, for example, is one of his ways to achieve that. The key question for him is always about how to create value.
He clearly thought law school a poor use of his time. Indeed, “Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be lawyers.” He did concede that dual degree students had a cachet: studying law made them appear intelligent. But even about that concession am I not sure. Perhaps he was half-jokingly suggesting that intellect may be a bad thing in business.
He never took the bar exam. He got the stack of review books and sent them back. As soon as he did that, his wife gave him a pen with his initials on it. It was originally meant to be a gift for bar passage.
He did not appeal to every student. For example, he claimed women were a group often neglected by established real estate companies because (1) most managers were men; and (2) most of the women in those companies were engineers or contractors so they were like men anyway. Maybe not an erroneous observation, but that certainly did not endear himself to Elle, who shook her head in protest.
But that is the man he is. A man who knows which building he was going to, and who dares park in front of it. And that is admirable.
Responding to a question on whether graphing calculators would be permitted in a midterm exam, the Sloan Professor teaching my class expressed his concerns of an arms race but ultimately relented:
Well, this is MIT. In Austria, we have an honor code that asks everyone to cheat and that asks everyone to help others to cheat. I’ve cheated in some spectacular ways—when I was a student. The solution there is to make exams so long that you have no time to finish it, let alone cheat. Cheating takes time.
Long exams remind me of T., but there the problem is not cheating. Professors enjoy making exams memorable for students. The only exception is Professor Dmitrevsky. Constantly decrying the decline of the Western educational system, he finds most students nowadays too stupid to write a proper, challenging exam.
