196 THE CREATIVE INVESTMENT TEAM
the cat. My expression must have revealed my excitement because
the next thing the analyst said was, “Oh crap! What day is it?
Tuesday? Damn it! You can’t tell anybody I said that. I forgot that
they aren’t announcing the divestiture until tomorrow.” Usually
Wall Street analysts are pretty unflappable, but this guy looked
like he had a live cigarette down his pants, so I knew some serious
beans had been spilled. It was the kind of information that would
give Gordon Gekko moist palms. My point is simply that informa-
tion is precious and must be protected at all costs. (As you could
guess from looking at the car I drive, I didn’t parlay that slip into
a financial fortune.)
It’s no surprise then that analysts tend to live their lives like
expert gamblers, keeping poker faces and hiding their cards. The
problem with this approach—a theme that this book drives home
with a hammer—is that it lacks balance. In the same way that we
need to be shrewd about when to use our different traits, like sens-
ing versus intuition, we need to know when to be open and when
to be focused. Likewise, we need to know when to keep our own
counsel and when to share information and enlist help. At the risk
of being blunt, I’ll say that investment professionals wouldn’t rec-
ognize the power of collaboration if it bit them in the behind.
This Lone Ranger approach (“I’ll do it myself, without help”)
may be traced to the high value that investors place on being com-
petent. Many investment professionals equate asking for help with
being incompetent. Because they would rather endure third-degree
burns than appear incompetent, they don’t ask. Why do I believe
this? A couple of examples should illustrate adequately. First is one
from a playful chief financial officer (yes, they do exist) that I
befriended years ago. He used to get bored during analyst interro-
gations, so he would mischievously drop in acronyms and lingo
that were nonsense. His purpose? Just to see if anyone would stop
him and ask, “What does that mean?” It tickled him to see these
hot-shot analysts nodding and squinting their eyes, doing their best
imitations of Wise King Solomon, while all the time he was talking14-25 ware 196 1/19/01, 1:16 PM