Lemons, Lemonade, and Lehman

About 6 months ago, I received an email from Dana Feller, a former colleague with whom I had worked at Lehman Brothers as part of the 1995 incoming analyst class.

Would we, she was asking the entire class, be interested in a reunion?

Absolutely, I responded, and immediately started tweaking my calendar to allow me to attend.

Last Thursday, a small group of Lehman's 1995 class met for drinks at the World Financial Center in Manhattan, in the shadows of the building where we had spent our analyst years at the firm. I arrived early at the meeting place (one of the many eateries from which we had ordered many a late night dinner) and took a walk around the area, reliving almost 30-year old memories at the beautiful Winter Garden nearby, with its towering long necked palm trees, facing the distant but unmistakable profile of Lady Liberty, across the Hudson River.

Over drinks, we oscillated from hugs and hearing each other's updates and oohing over pictures of our children. 29 years ago, we were just leaving childhood ourselves, freshly out of college, and wide-eyed and excited about the allure of Wall Street. And as big kids, we grew up quickly and lost some innocence in the years that followed.

We lost some innocence in the intensity of the finance world, with all its extreme delight and dysfunction. We lost some innocence in the calamity of 9/11, when death and debris fell from the skies in the area where we had once toiled in 20-hour workdays, on the very sidewalks we had scurried on. We lost some innocence in 2008, when Lehman imploded spectacularly as part of a bigger contagion of Wall Street excess, and many, including workmates and friends, lost their livelihoods and nest eggs in a single, debt-disfigured and devastating weekend.

On Thursday, we revisited these old wounds, and were sobered as we remembered how lives, including ours, had been transformed for the better or disrupted for the worse. Also, we found gratitude and laughter in what we have now and joy that what had most survived the last 29 years were deep friendships and hard-earned learnings that time and emotional scar tissue had not buried.

Gratitude is a choice of how to react, in order to be constructive with the rest of our lives. We all now know better how we prefer to be, from the lessons of that time, and how to be better guides to our children and to others, and better stewards of institutions in our care.

All things considered, I am grateful for those years, especially for the many skills and perspectives I picked up that still serve me well today. Now, as I do work with boards, I can easily trace the linkages between conversations and practices in good governance and the wellbeing and livelihoods of the real people who toil each day to make corporations succeed, and who presume and deserve good citizenship in corporate leaders. These are tensions, yes, but these have never been impossible tensions. Managing them, just like being grateful, is a choice.

Last Thursday, as we left after two hours to head our separate ways, some to homes in New York City and some to other cities elsewhere, we felt a warmth, that despite everything, our lives had turned out fine, even if differently than we had planned back in the wide-eyed and innocent days. We felt the warmth that our friendships and relationships had endured, and stood the test of time, separation and distance.

Let’s meet again next year and celebrate 30 years, we said, and resolved.

I am already looking forward to it.