But just as it is important not to flinch on the road to strategic success, so it is essential not to press beyond what is sustainable. We had been riding many wild horses simultaneously. We could not now confuse virtuosity with a long-range strategy. We had to avoid risking everything for marginal gains, for we had achieved our fundamental objectives.
We held the cards now. Our next challenge was to play our hand.
I told Dinitz that the art of foreign policy was to know when to clinch one’s victories.
There are degrees of speculation; the word itself, like “selfishness” or “greed,” denotes a judgment, and yet every exchange of currencies might be called a speculation in favor of the currency being acquired and against the one being disposed of.
The way to survive and flourish is to make the best damn product you can. And if you can’t survive and flourish on that, then you shouldn’t. If you can’t make a good car, then you deserve to go down like the rock that was the US auto industry in the 1970s. Success is about quality and giving folks what they want.
It’s not about trying to control people.
The trouble is, people and companies are too often motivated by pure greed. And that always causes them to lose in the long run. Greed leads to decisions governed by paranoia and a need for total control. Those are bad, short-sighted decisions that end up in disaster, or near disaster.
But again, it’s much larger than Gupta himself. The revelation that someone who had led the firm for ten years could have so lost sight of the value systems that Marvin had built into the place made me aware of both how far the US had moved in a money-is-all-that’s-important direction as well as how far the financial community had lost sight of why it was set up in the first place, which was to help actual companies doing actual things.
He could have done anything he wanted in life.
And what he wanted, by all accounts, wasn’t to be a mere centa-millionaire. Rajat Gupta wanted to be a billionaire. And he wanted it badly.
What Gupta and Madoff did is something different. They already had everything: unimaginable wealth, prestige, power, freedom. And they threw it all away because they wanted more.
The hardest financial skill is getting the goalposts to stop moving.
Having more — more money, more power, more prestige — increases ambition faster than satisfaction.
Insecurity is the mother of greed.
It does not seem impossible to make youth understand that the stability of a society, and the prevalence of moral restraint, are prerequisites to personal security, and that moral self-restraint is one of the surest guarantees of personal advancement and fulfillment.
For thousands, perhaps millions, of years men were uncertain of their food supply; not knowing yet the bounty of husbanded soil, the depended upon the fortunes of the hunt. Having captured prey they tore or cut it into pieces, often on the spot, and gorged themselves to their cubic capacity with the raw flesh and the warm gore; how could they tell when they might eat again? Greed is eating, or hoarding, for the future; wealth is originally a hedge against starvation; war is at first a raid for food. Perhaps all vices were once virtues, indispensable in the struggle for existence; they became vices only in the degree to which social order and increasing security rendered them unnecessary for survival. Once men had to chase, to kill, to grasp, to overeat, to hoard; a hundred millenniums of insecurity bred into the race those acquisitive and possessive impulses which no laws or morals or ideals, but only centuries of security, can mitigate or destroy.
The possession of power tempts to its use; the definition of national interest widens to cover any aim; the demand for security suggests and excuses the acquisition and arming of ever more distant frontiers.
Every economy, to succeed, must appeal to the acquisitive instinct — the desire for food, goods, and powers, and never in historic times was that impulse so unchecked as under capitalism. The itch for profit may not be overwhelming in the common man, but it is strong in men who are above the average in economic ability; and it is this half of the nation that will sooner or later mold the economy and the laws.
The same negotiators meet over and over again; their ability to deal with one another is undermined if a diplomat acquires a reputation for evasion or duplicity. But there is no premium in the Soviet system for farsighted restraint.