Speaker unverified: commitment

Transcript context

…For folks who are not familiar, it's not in New York. It's a large bank, but it's a troubled bank. It's based in Chicago. When you say large, David, it's a $30 billion market cap bank. Citigroup, where you just had been before, was a $200 billion bank. It was 21 billion at the time. Because you have the right numbers. But it did a split. And so if you look back, it was more like 20 billion or something like that. Yeah. And Citi was 200. But I didn't worry about that. It was like, in life, you make things what they are. I don't like complaining about over spilled milk. You just put on your pants, get going, and see what you can make out of it. But you... it sounds like you had opportunities to stay in New York to run. I did. Bigger, more glamorous businesses. This one, I was going to run the company. The other ones would have been some investment banks. I didn't really trust some of the people who were talking to me about that. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff that I explored. I took phone calls from some small companies, some big companies. There's a couple of subprime mortgage companies who called me, and I was like, "Absolutely not." We'll get to that, we'll get to that. That, we'll get to that. And so I just thought this was a chance. If the family's willing to move, and we got a nice... Took us a while. We had to live in a rental for a while, but got a nice brownstone, and we ended up loving Chicago. Chicago is a wonderful city in a lot of different ways. And, like I said, it is what you make it. And I put half my money in the stock at the time. Yeah. Yeah. I tied my... I was going to be the captain of the ship. I was going to go down with the ship. I made it clear to everyone I was here permanently, and it will be what it is. And so I got to work literally the next day. Did we do the math right, that, right before you joined Bank One, you bought $60 million of stock? I did. I mean, I've never heard of someone taking a CEO job and saying, "I'm going to invest half my net worth in this company now." Yeah. And I thought it might be overvalued a little bit, because there was... people thought it might be sold or something like that, but I didn't care about that. If you work at a company and the new CEO comes in, he's from out of town, and you're going to have a lot of shareholders. And I knew a lot of the shareholders. I was going to know a lot of the shareholders. I wanted to know. I was in 100%, lock, stock, and barrel. There was no question I would never sell that stock. And I'm going to go down with the ship or go up with the ship. And they also knew I was making decisions that I thought were right for the long-term health of the company, not for a short-term type of thing. So what did you find when you got there? Day one on the job, you start investigating. Is it better, worse, or the same than you thought? You know, there had been an analyst called Mike Mayo who had done a report. you find when you got there? Day one on the job, you start investigating. Is it better, worse, or the same than you thought? You know, there had been an analyst called Mike Mayo who had done a report. I remember one of the great lines in the report: "Even Hercules couldn't fix it." It had been an amalgamation of Bank One, First Chicago, National Bank of Detroit. They'd never put the companies together. So they had multiple statement systems, processing systems, payment systems, and SAP systems. They had different brands, services coming down. We were losing accounts, they were closing branches. It was a mess.…

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