High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg by Niall Ferguson

Author:Niall Ferguson [Ferguson, Niall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Business, Business & Economics, Banks & Banking
ISBN: 9780141975849
Google: jFvJjUxgqmcC
Amazon: 159420246X
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2010-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

This preoccupation with imminent retirement was linked to Warburg’s passionate faith in the vigour of youth. He was much taken with a phrase of Keynes’s: ‘that exuberant inexperience which is essential to success’.162 It was his conviction that the firm must constantly be rejuvenated by younger men with that quality. ‘I want to arrive in the near future at the stage of giving up my executive responsibilities on both sides of the Atlantic and of becoming a sort of senior adviser,’ he explained to Grierson in 1958, ‘whilst my younger associates are to reach the top of responsibility in full measure and with good tempo!’163 Already that year he was telling John Schiff that ‘in London the organization is now such that I am completely free from executive duties.’164 It was time, he told Thalmann, to pass his executive duties ‘to the younger members’.165 At the end of 1959, still aged only fifty-seven, he formally announced his decision to become a non-executive director, along with Korner and Thalmann, so as not to ‘stand in the way of their younger colleagues’ – though he retained his position as chairman of the board of Mercury Securities until 1964.166 He hoped, he told Grunfeld, ‘to give a great deal of time … to various interests of mine in the field of literature, psychology and graphology’.167

Certainly, Warburg’s greatest strength as a business leader was his ability to inspire the younger men around him. He wanted them, he once wrote, to think of ‘what I call the SGW & Co. management team as a kind of family or clan comprising various generations and a great variety of brains and temperaments’ and hoped:

that those who belong to this family or clan will always feel that they form a community of real friends and see in the firm and in the continuous development of its management team a cause which should transcend any kind of jealousies or vanities or considerations of personal financial advantage.

If we try to preserve and cultivate a spirit of this sort, we should be able to hand on from generation to generation far beyond our lifetime a torch of high aims which we are to pursue with good cheer through constructive work to be achieved by the firm in service to our country and to the Free World.168

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