Another lesson I learned the hard way: Don’t wait to decide what kind of culture you wish to have in your company. Determine it at the beginning and then design it, implement it, teach it, and lead by example. If you don’t, your company will have a culture, but it will be a culture by default. That might be good or it might be bad, but it will not be of your making. A strong culture is critical to long-term success, but only in a crisis will you find out how important culture is in the short term.

The financial crisis, while brutal for our business, didn’t kill us. My family crisis, while personally devastating, didn’t destroy us. But something else almost did—a culture crisis that sharply divided the firm in two.

As we were entering the economic downturn, we hired a group of incredibly smart and hard-working people who had previously been at a large bulge bracket bank. They brought a lot of experience that we were lacking in many areas of our business—especially the algorithmic business—and we believed their skills would bring great value to our firm. As they got to work, it was clear they truly did possess talent and experience where we were lacking and they brought a new sense of urgency and work ethic to the firm.

However, about a year into the group’s tenure, I started hearing about some worrisome issues. As opposed to working as one Liquidnet team, this new unit was choosing to fiercely compete against other departments and other teams. Instead of helping other areas and groups succeed, they made sure resources were not available to them in an effort to ensure that any other projects would fail. It became clear this wasn’t just something coming from a few paranoid employees; the new team actually told people they would make sure other departments would fail. I assume they believed they were so smart and productive that they would become indispensable and they could take over more of the firm. I assume they also thought that in order for them to succeed others had to fail.

This, of course, was counter to everything we believed in and the culture we had built. It seemed incredible to me that people could be so bold and ruthless about their personal goals at the expense of others in the firm.

This team was very loyal to those people who reported to them, and as a result, they had very ardent supporters. At the same time, the team tried to crush anyone not on its team. They viewed everyone else at Liquidnet as the opposition. Those not on their team grew to resent the newcomers and the dangerous power they wielded. Needless to say, this resulted in a very toxic environment. We were reeling from disappointments and disasters, so the firm was divided into those who thought they were exactly what Liquidnet needed and those who believed they were further destroying Liquidnet.

The firm was becoming polarized around this group, with many people saying, “If they go, we go,” and just as many saying, “If they don’t go, we will.” Everyone knew that the situation had to be resolved and was looking to see which way I would go. Would I let this star team go? Or would I keep them and promote them to run all of development as they wished. In either case, we knew we would lose people—up to half of our developers who were loyal to one faction or the other.

If You Don’t Fully Trust Employees, Let Them Go

I asked our human resources team to dig in and do a more in-depth investigation and come back to me with a recommendation. Their findings were that the concern was overblown, that they were not as bad as people were saying, and that they were incredibly productive. Their recommendation was to bite the bullet and put the new team in charge of all of development.

As I was considering the recommendation, I had to admit that while they were smart and savvy, they didn’t reflect the values of the firm or the culture we had built. This presented the classic dilemma of do you keep the really talented people at the expense of your culture, or do you stay true to your culture and in our case, the “no asshole” rule? Furthermore, I had a moment where I feared that if we parted ways, they could possibly do something terrible, like plant something malicious into our code base. I knew that if I had even an inkling of that concern, I clearly did not trust them. That cemented the decision for me: they had to go.

There was so much anxiety within the company leading up to the decision and worry over the two dramatically different possible outcomes—whether we would part ways or whether they would be put in charge of all of technology. I asked the team to come to a meeting the morning of my decision, and no one in the firm knew which way it would go except for HR and me. The team was shown the door and left Liquidnet that day.

Almost immediately after the decision was made, there was a collective sigh of relief throughout the organization. Within a couple of weeks of their departure, the mood around the company went from dark to almost exuberant. It was as if a black cloud that was the source of all the tension had parted and given way to light. That was a huge confirmation that I made the right decision.

People no longer felt they had to look over shoulders or be so protective of their work. They began to enjoy their jobs again and flourished. I realized that for too long we had been working against each other—fighting against ourselves instead of the enemy. When we demonstrated—through action—that we were serious about our core values and our culture, we became a newly united organization. People worked collaboratively again, and many stepped up and took on more responsibility, and productivity soared. In the end, only a few people left, and those who stayed proved to be pure Liquidnet people who exhibited our values and were in pursuit of the same collective corporate goals.

Determining the kind of company you want to build and the culture you want to create is one of the most important decisions you can make. A culture has to be envisioned, crafted, and created. It has to be taught, lived, demonstrated, and upheld. Any deviation from the top will invalidate the values. Any act that is counter to the culture has to be noted and dealt with immediately. It is very easy to overlook or forgive certain lapses in your culture, but while culture can be taught, it is implemented only through action and living it every day. Each lapse diminishes the culture a bit. Many lapses or prolonged failure to fix a lapse in culture can destroy it.

During our culture crisis, I saw the value of our strong culture, and out of that strength grew what I call our efficient organ-rejection mechanism. If we hire someone that does not fit our culture, it becomes obvious to people around that person way faster than it does to those of us in leadership. People who work with that person form the antibodies identifying the foreign object, and that filters up to leadership fairly quickly and we take steps to fix it. If we can’t fix it, we reject it. That mechanism protects the whole system. Only in a strong, well-understood culture will everyone be able to identify people that fit and people that don’t. Too many times a bad hire can stay around for way too long, causing morale issues or poor work habits that affect all those around them, but an efficient organ-rejection mechanism helps protect against that.

Admit the Brutal Facts

Pulling ourselves out of the many crises that hit us meant that we had to admit that we had serious problems—face them and fix them. We focused on our biggest problems first, declining revenue in the U.S. and European regions.

We had to significantly upgrade our hiring process to ensure that every new hire was a great hire, which is detailed later in this chapter. We used the new hiring process to hire Brennan Warble as the new head of U.S. sales. Within two years, the U.S. sales staff had changed by almost 60 percent. Boston, our biggest region in the United States, was a big problem. It had the highest potential, but we were doing terribly. We needed a new leader there. We used our interviewing and hiring process—benchmarking the characteristics of the best salespeople, looking for those traits through personality tests and an intensive interview process. It worked and we found Tracy Windham, the perfect internal candidate. Tracy had moved from Liquidnet U.S. to Liquidnet Asia-Pac eight years before as a relationship manager and grew to run all of sales in the region—which she did very effectively. We brought her back to run Boston. We folded Canada, which was its own region, and underperforming, into a new “Americas region,” with everyone reporting to Brennan. The Canada business is up significantly year over year since we made the change.

We hired a new head of Europe, Mark Pumfrey, a leader who didn’t come with an electronic trading background, but who met the criteria of what we benchmarked for a successful managing director. We put a lot of effort into the search. He interviewed with more than 20 people and received unanimous support. He was the right fit and has grown the European business materially in three years.

Hiring more effectively and accurately was crucially important, and the successful hires helped to turn the company around. But there was so much more to do. We used to joke at the conclusion of leadership off-sites that we were focused on 12 of our top 10 priorities. The problem was that it was true. There is no way you can focus on so many priorities at once and do them all flawlessly. We had to stop that ridiculousness. Coming out of the crisis, we altered our strategy to focus on three things, as mentioned in the previous chapter.

First, we would focus on our core business, global block trading. That’s still the bulk of our business. We needed to focus on growing this foundation, and did so by expanding into new markets such as Taiwan and India. We also grew it by enhancing the amount of liquidity with new products and adding new members and new sources of liquidity, such as venture capitalists and private equity firms, to expand on our lead as the largest, most diversified pool of block liquidity.

Second, we focused on new business areas, such as the execution and quantitative strategies (EQS) business—the algorithmic business—which leverages our global platform and offers a much larger opportunity than our core business. We want to win at whatever we do, and we want to be the best in the world at it. We were not the best in the world at the algorithmic business and we knew that. Facing the brutal facts gave us the urgency to change our strategy there. We brought in a new person to head that business, Rob Laible, who spent his whole career in electronic trading. Rob quickly built a new team. We re-architected the entire global trading technology infrastructure and built a new algorithmic suite. It’s resulted in record growth. We launched in Asia-Pac in the first half of 2016 and expect similar success.

Third, we focused on diversifying our revenue. We acquired a small fixed-income company called Vega-Chi. We already had all the largest asset managers globally as members. The most profitable business strategy is to sell more products to existing customers, so we made some enhancements to the platform, plugged the new company into our distribution system, and about a year and a half later flipped the switch and should break even within a year. It’s been a fast-growing, high-potential diversification of revenue strategy. Entering the fixed-income business has begun our transition to a broad, global, diversified financial services firm.

In each of these turnarounds we stuck to strategies we’d seen work before. We established a client base and expanded it by selling more products into that base, and we made sure that we had an unfair competitive advantage in each new business we entered. Our EQS business had to be better than the existing offerings, and we made it so by leveraging our strength of having desktop space on every trader’s desk and access to the largest, most diverse pool of liquidity. In fixed income, we created an unfair competitive advantage by leveraging our customer base and technology to do something that was never done before—centralizing all fixed-income liquidity in one institutional pool: ours.

Hire Partners, Not Employees

In surviving crises and executing a comeback, I learned that hiring is the most important thing to get right. After many, many mistakes, we have honed a hiring process that we feel really good about and has resulted in many more fits than not.

As we learned with the team hire from the large bulge bracket firm, not everyone is a fit for Liquidnet, and Liquidnet is not a fit for everyone. So how did we figure out who will succeed here? We look to hire people who have four passions: a passion for their work, a passion for Liquidnet, a passion to continue to learn and improve, and a passion to win. Employees must have the ability, the determination, and the work ethic to be the best in the world at what they do. If they’re most interested in the amount of money they’ll earn, the amount of vacation time they’ll get, or the title they’ll receive, those are red flags that this candidate may not be the right cultural fit. We benchmark the character and personality traits of the best people we have in the roles that we need to fill and ask that every candidate take two personality tests to see how close they are to our benchmark employee’s traits.

We are very clear that we’re not looking for employees—we’re looking for partners. That means that we expect everyone to share and live our core values, to always do what’s in the best interest of the company, and we hold everyone accountable to be awesome at what they do. There’s a lot of reinforcement of that. We give everyone at Liquidnet stock or options so that they feel invested in this company. It works. Partners take more responsibility for the whole enterprise as opposed to only their role within it. The benefits range from a constant flow of suggestions for how we can improve the company and our products to people looking more critically at their own expenses as well as what’s spent in the company because they see it as their money. We want partners who feel responsible for the good of the whole organization.

No Titles . . .

Getting the right people in the door is one thing, but keeping them is another. What do great people want? Figuring that out is the secret to attracting and retaining the right people and providing them long-term opportunities.

We were never really that into titles at Liquidnet, but within the development organization, the largest department, titles started to become a big deal. There were many different levels and a clear hierarchy to the roles. While it wasn’t quite as bad as a bank where there’s an associate vice president, vice president, executive vice president, super executive vice president, and so on, we started seeing our own “title creep” come in. People we were recruiting were fixated on what title they would be given and our existing people were hyper-focused on being promoted to the next title.

We found that having titles and people aspiring to get to the next title wasn’t really helping the company. It was helping individuals build their resumes, but it wasn’t helping them build Liquidnet. That was a problem because our allegiance is to the company, not the individual.

By investigating it further, we discovered that titles themselves inherently carry a lot of problems. For starters, titles are a class system of tenure and seniority. That means that titles create divides. We felt that titles prevented or inhibited people from offering their opinions in a meeting. We didn’t want to have a situation where an associate sitting at a table with an executive VP was scared to speak their mind because there was an executive VP in the room.

We decided we would eliminate all titles. Rather than people aspiring to attain a higher title, I wanted people to aspire to take on more responsibility. More responsibility is better for the company and therefore should get them more recognition and be better for their careers at Liquidnet.

It’s complete common sense, but it was very controversial when I announced we would eliminate all titles. To most of the people at the company it was received well because it was “very Liquidnet.” (Translation: very different from Wall Street.) But to a few people it was of great concern. How will we be able to attract people if we don’t offer them a good title? If we change jobs, how do we know whether it’s a lateral move or a step up? If everybody in the department has the same business card, how will vendors know to whom they should be talking?

Abandoning titles served as a self-selection mechanism. It actually helped us attract the right people. If title is what’s really important to someone, then this was not the right place for him or her. It also helped speed up the onboarding process since title was no longer an issue to be negotiated. As far as vendors being confused, that didn’t manifest at all. We explained the reasons we were eliminating titles and our people understood that we wanted everyone’s viewpoint no matter how senior or junior they were, and if they really wanted to get ahead at the company, they should look to take on more responsibility over time.

Having no titles is more than symbolic. Leveling the playing field in this way has elevated everyone’s involvement. Everyone understands they have a voice and they are not afraid to speak up in any situation. The power of tapping everyone’s brains in the company has been tremendous.

Just to give you one example: One time I was in a meeting proposing an idea I was very excited about. The room was filled. There was one person, an intern, who was still in college and just with us for the summer. He disagreed with me and spoke up against my idea. He very clearly articulated why it didn’t make sense and he made such a good case that I agreed with him right there in the meeting. He was right and his speaking up ultimately saved the company a lot of time. Great ideas come from everywhere, people just have to be empowered to share them and everyone has to be open to listening.

No Ties . . .

Unlike the rest of the financial world, Liquidnet has a no-suits-and-no-ties mandate. Like not having titles in a world where titles are status symbols, mandating no ties or suits around the office or at client meetings is an important visual and social statement of informality we feel benefits the workplace, interpersonal relationships within the company, and, even more importantly, with our customers. I want to encourage casual and friendly interaction between people, which is just too hard when people are dressed formally. When we’re sitting around in jeans, or whatever people want to wear, that’s the kind of interaction I want.

We have much closer relationships with our members than do people at other firms I believe in part due to our dress code. There are many things within our firm’s culture that enables us to have closer relationships with our members but we relate to our members much more casually and more as friends than people at other firms in part due to our casual dress code.

. . . and No Assholes

At every new employee orientation we explain that we have a clear “No Asshole Policy” here. We all work together. There’s no backstabbing, no territoriality, no hoarding of information. If we see bureaucracy creep in, we try our best to stamp it out. Everybody should be invested and working in the same direction and pulling as one team.

It’s very important that people understand we have a zero tolerance policy. It doesn’t matter how good you are, if you’re an asshole, you’re going to get fired. This is much harder to adhere to than one might think. You have to be extremely disciplined in upholding this policy, especially when you have a super-smart and productive employee who just can’t get along with other people or has a different set of values or priorities than the company. But disciplined you must be: even if it hurts in the short run, it is critical in the long run.

Having this unusually stated policy in place has provided clear direction for everybody in all of our offices, all around the world. Managers have permission—and a blessing—to get rid of folks who cause problems with their teams. The people who work here now are talented and good-hearted. When people like what they do, like who they work with, and share the same values, you don’t spend time on the negatives and your productivity soars and your opportunities are only limited by your imagination.

Invest in People

People remain excited about their jobs when they are continually learning and growing in their roles. Investing in your employees, providing training programs, funds for coursework, and mentors who can help them develop their skills is good for business. I don’t understand how some companies that don’t train their employees think that everyone they hire is the best possible version they can be. How can you be the best team if you’re not constantly training, practicing, and improving?

Investing in training our employees is investing in our company for the long term. Our people love that we invest in their education and we love that having better-trained people raises the game throughout the company. It also says that our people are not simply cogs in a wheel. They are very important to us and we want to train them to continue to be the best that they can possibly be.

To this end, we created a budget per employee for external education and conferences and started Liquidnet University to develop very tailored training courses. The type of courses we handle internally are more soft skills, including courses on presentation training, management skills, sales skills, negotiation, and leadership skills. Liquidnet University also develops the intensive training programs we put new senior-level employees through. If we do not have the in-house expertise, then we supplement with the external resources and encourage our people to sign up for external courses that will help them do their jobs or grow into new responsibilities. Recently, we’ve gone another step above that and partnered with New York University to create a mini-master’s degree for our high-potential talent. We’ve identified talent at all levels, all over the world, and we fly them in for three intense one-week programs, over the course of a year and a half at NYU, where they get an advanced crash course in the financial industry, business management, financial management, marketing, and strategy, among other subjects. All classes are selected in partnership with NYU and tailored specifically to our company.

But being happy at work is also about allowing people to have fun. I love that you can be in or walk past any meeting and there will always be some laughter. We want to ensure that people like who they work with and enjoy their time here. To that end, we create opportunities for them to build camaraderie. It starts with our office space. Every office around the world has the same design (and looks very different from a typical Wall Street firm’s offices). We designed the offices to be open and bright with many communal spaces where people can congregate. We have large cafes in the center of the offices, and the fridges are always stocked with soft drinks and beer and the café is always filled with snacks, so much so that it looks like a small grocery store. But we don’t charge anyone—it’s all theirs. We want them to feel a sense of ownership. Every Friday we cater lunch. Several times a month we host different activities, like cake day to celebrate the birthdays that month; “Cheer,” which is a contraction of cheese and beer night; and Quiz Night, where people socialize and have fun together.

Sometimes, when times are hard, as they were during the financial crisis, you have to measure the cost of providing these services relative to another hire. You have to make tough choices about what to cut. But I believe the decision rests on treating the people who continue to come to work every day in the best manner possible. Ultimately, it’s not at all about snacks; it’s about the whole package you present: it’s your culture, it’s your mission, it’s how you lead. It is a competitive world out there, and you want the best people in the world, so you have to give them reasons to want to work at your company rather than somewhere else.

Your company is only as good as the people who work for it. Your value as a manager is based on the quality of the people on your team. I believe that every person makes a difference, and I want everyone to know that. That is why I personally meet every employee around the world—and I know their names and try to get to know them as people. It’s why every Friday I invite a group of five or six employees to have lunch with me. It’s why I write handwritten cards to everyone who’s celebrating a three-year, five-year, or ten-year anniversary with the company. Every single person who works at Liquidnet is important and makes a difference. Everything that we do as a company and that I do as the CEO has to reflect that in actions, or else it is just words on paper somewhere.

Constant Improvement Must Be Part of the Culture

The reason I tell everyone during orientation that I’d much rather they assume that everything that we do here is wrong and part of their responsibility is to help us fix it is that I want everyone to know that we are on a constant drive to improve and everyone in the company has the responsibility to drive it. If it doesn’t make sense to someone why we do something a certain way, question it. Maybe it’s wrong. If you’re growing quickly, what you did six months ago might have made complete sense, but today it doesn’t.

One of the benefits of hiring new people is that if they have worked at other places, there has to be something that another firm does better than you and you should want to take advantage of those ideas. If everyone in the company knows they are responsible for constant improvement, there should be less ego and more willingness to try new ideas and acknowledge that there are things that you can do better.

I have always been afraid that being in the day-to-day will inhibit our ability to improve, innovate, and deliver new disruptive solutions to the market. This concern was immortalized in Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business Review Press, 1997), which describes how successful companies all too often are completely focused on growing their business and solving their customers’ current needs that they lose sight of the next disruption that might solve their customer’s future problems. I never want my company to suffer the innovator’s dilemma. We do have to continue to solve our customers’ current needs, but there have to be some people who focus time and energy thinking about solutions beyond today’s needs.

At Liquidnet, thinking about the future is primarily my responsibility. It is also my responsibility to withstand the pushback from the leadership team, who are accountable for the day-to-day and shorter-term goals. I have to push the company to allocate time and resources to deliver the next big thing that, if successful, might deliver revenue a few years down the road. I am religious about taking time to brainstorm new ideas, new processes, and new solutions to problems whether they are new product ideas, new marketing ideas, new ways to approach clients—anything and everything.

And since you can’t brainstorm alone, I bring together people who are best able to brainstorm these ideas. Not everyone is good at brainstorming, and having those people in a brainstorming session is more disruptive than helpful. It’s important to have creative people in the brainstorming group, and not all should be domain experts; involving people from different parts of the company gains different perspectives.

We have adopted a couple of brainstorming techniques at Liquidnet on which we provide training and for which we can provide facilitators. One simple methodology that we use often is called “divergent-convergent brainstorming.” You pick a topic to brainstorm, and you go around the room writing down every idea that comes up without any critique or bias. That is the divergent part. Once all ideas have been delivered, you can give stickers or votes to each person to converge and pick the top three to five ideas. The ones with the most stickers or votes are the ideas that you drill into.

Our culture is to encourage new ideas and to cross-pollinate ideas. We try to eliminate all of our egos and listen to all suggestions and should be grateful when someone provides an idea that allows us to improve because everyone knows we’ll succeed if we’re on a continuing improvement cycle. By being self-critical and sharing ideas where we can improve, people are actually helping us.

This has enabled us to build a worldwide idea meritocracy. We have ideas coming from all over the world at an increasing pace. Most of our current new initiatives and products are now based on ideas that have come from people outside the leadership team. I view that statistic as an incredibly successful metric. Because of our focus on hiring great people, on continuous improvement and commitment to idea meritocracy, we have a very healthy pipeline of great ideas and we are able to implement and deliver those ideas faster and more consistently than our competition. This enables us to put greater distance between us and our competition around the world and since those ideas are being generated by lots of people involved in the business and not just me, I get to focus more of my time on the next big thing.

Repair the World

We say we want people who are passionate about their jobs, our company, and mission to make markets more efficient and a passion to continually improve. Our business has never just been about making money. If we can’t make a market more efficient or apply technology to significantly improve some part of the market, we won’t do it.

There was something else that was extremely important to me that I implemented as soon as we started to make some money. I believe every person and company has a higher purpose and that is to make the world a better place. The first responsibility I had was to make the company successful and profitable. Once I accomplished that I wanted Liquidnet to be the example of what corporate social responsibility could be. Not simply checkbook philanthropy, I wanted to make sure that we took on challenges that could change the world and make it a better place.

I believe that most people would like to give back in some way, but they either don’t know how or are not given the opportunity to do so. I wanted Liquidnet to provide our employees with ways they can make the world a better place. We created Liquidnet for Good and hired a brilliant young person named Brian Walsh to run it full time. We followed the philosophy of Tikkun olam—the idea found in the Mishnah, a compilation of rabbinic teachings that we all have a responsibility to repair the world—and we embrace it.

When Anne and I first married, we used to talk about what we would do when we had money. We dreamed big. I wanted to be rich and she wanted to have enough money to buy horses and ride and then give the rest away. It was always a division of labor: I would make the money; she would give it away. And the more I made, the more she gave away.

But giving away money was never enough. We wanted to go way beyond just writing checks and using all of our resources for good. Anne was a former prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and brilliant in just about everything she did. She was the inspiration behind Liquidnet’s philanthropic vision and programs. The person who we both thought was the most intelligent CEO of a large family foundation and to whom we both went for advice on our philanthropic goals later told me that Anne was the best philanthropist he had ever met. I wish he had told her that.

Anne developed and drove our biggest personal project and the signature project for Liquidnet, a youth village in the middle of Rwanda for orphans of the 1994 genocide. The Youth Village is named the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village (ASYV). Agahozo means a place where tears are dried in Kinyarwanda, and Shalom means peace in Hebrew. The village was inspired by the Israeli youth villages that provided homes for orphans from the Holocaust. The ASYV is a 144-acre campus that includes 32 homes, each housing 16 high school–age kids and a house mother, a high school, science and computer laboratories, sports fields, an organic farm, an 800-person cafeteria serving three meals a day, a reforestation program, and medical facilities.

This was initially a family endeavor, conceived of and executed by Anne, but the effort grew up with our company. Hundreds of Liquidnet employees from around the world, family members, and friends, through volunteer work, have contributed their time, resources, and passion; another 100 employees have visited the village to use their skills to turn this idea into a sustainable reality. Liquidnet employees have helped to set up human resource systems and procedures and an information technology infrastructure, implement accounting systems, install a wireless network throughout the village, create computer labs, and provide leadership training and staff development. Our employees have seen the village transform from a concept to blueprints to buildings to a village of 500 that the most vulnerable kids in the country call home.

The village has profoundly changed these kids’ lives. In fact, it gave them lives. Kids who went from having absolutely nothing, from living on the streets, from having no home, no hope, and no future, to having brothers and sisters, access to the most modern facilities and teaching methods, sports teams, music and art teachers, and the highest scores in the country on their matriculation exams. Some 98.3 percent of them passed the National Secondary Exam; some 80 percent go to university on scholarships.

Doing this work changed our lives as well. It made us better people. It helped us attract the right people to the company and made our company better. Because of the programs, we truly have a higher purpose than simply making money and a higher purpose for the money we make.

I find that when we find the right people—people with this giving spirit—we can spark much more significant transformations and enjoy much more meaningful accomplishments. Giving back can become part of everyone’s job description, and with that opportunity and responsibility incredible things can happen. Every company can and should help to repair the world. It is every bit as good for the company as it is for the world we live in. And it’s the best way to build a corporate purpose and a corporate legacy. It extends you—and lives on.

It’s Not a Zero-Sum Game

Too often, too many see business as a zero sum game. That in order for me to win somebody has to lose. But that’s a false notion—and a dangerous one.

If there is one overall lesson I’ve learned in my career, it’s that you can build a great company, make a lot of money, do it honestly, and do good work at the same time.

I started out on Wall Street, which has long been defined by a culture that I define as how fast I can take money out of your pocket and put it in mine. It is for the most part an “eat what you kill” model. Employees get some percentage of the revenue that they generate, which means that everybody is his or her own profit center within their respective firms.

By not following that model—by looking at the industry through a different lens, by looking past business as usual and fixing the root of some very large problems that most people considered the cost of doing business, making business a team sport, having some fun while you are doing it, you can make a difference. You will improve some part of this world, you will positively impact the lives of your employees and your customers, and I hope that you will spend time and energy giving your employees an opportunity to make this world a better place. After all, work is where you spend much of your life. Life is short, and you only have one to live. You should do everything you can to make it count.

• • •

Appendix The Liquidnet Interview: Cultural Fit Questions

The following questions have been created to assist us in determining whether candidates are a Liquidnet culture fit, and whether they will be successful here. We assign specific questions at the interview team pre-huddle.

The Liquidnet Experience

We Are Laser-Focused and Know When to Say “No”

• Tell me about a time when you had clear deliverables and a supervisor or head of another department asked for your assistance/for you to take something else on. How did you handle it?
• It is goal-setting time. You and your boss have set some exciting goals for you and your team. You then realize, given the existing workload and bandwidth, that these are more “nice to have” than must-haves. How do you handle this?

Accountability and Empowerment Are in Harmony

• Tell me about a time when you worked on a team project and it was unclear who was in charge. What did you do?
• What would you do if you saw another employee acting out at a networking event and it clearly was not in the best interest of the company?

Honesty

• Think about a time when you were asked to provide specific information to a client/partner/other external party, but you knew that the information would not be positive. What did you do?
• Tell me about a time when you maintained high ethical standards despite pressure to do otherwise.
• Describe a situation where you observed someone being dishonest. How did you respond?

Innovation/Problem Solving

• Give me an example where you developed an unusual solution to a problem. What inspired you to come up with that?

Continuous Learner/Development

• What do you do to stay current in your field and at work in general?
• Tell me about a time when you were asked to change the way you do something.

Global Mind-Set

• Describe a time when you sought input from your coworkers globally, before making an important decision.
• Tell me about a time when you neglected to solicit input from your global business partners. What was the result? How did you address it?
• What are some of the challenges of running a global team? How do you handle them?

Other

Political

• Describe the corporate culture of your last two to three employers. What worked? What didn’t?
• Tell me of a time you observed office politics:
  • What did it look like?
  • What impact did it have on the organization or the person?
  • What did you do; what action(s) did you take?
• Tell me about a time when you made a mistake and someone was blamed for your error. How did you handle it?
• How would you respond if your manager told you that you could not speak directly to their manager or to the CEO without coming to her/him first?

Know It All

• Tell me about a time when you learned something significant from a junior person.
• Imagine that you had to hire your team completely from scratch. What kind of team would you create? What skills, knowledge, expertise, and viewpoints would you seek? How would these differ from what you bring to the table?
• Tell me a time when you thought you knew better and discovered that you didn’t.
• What was the biggest mistake you ever made?

Listening

• Rate your listening skills on scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the best).
• Describe what makes you a good listener.
• Have you ever received feedback that you need to work on your listening skills? If so, what did you do about it?
• Tell me about a time when you felt that you weren’t being heard. What made you believe that the other party wasn’t listening, and how does that impact the way that you listen to others?
• Tell me about a time when your supervisor or someone above you gave you an assignment, but his/her instructions and expectations weren’t clear. How did you handle this?
• Tell me about a time when you were in a meeting and passionately disagreed with someone’s opinion. How do you convey your point of view?

Collaboration

• How would you define a collaborative environment?
  • What does it look like?
  • Give me an example when you chose to collaborate with others when you could have done it alone.
  • Tell me about a time when you pulled back on your own goals for the sake of the team. Why did you do this, and what was the outcome?
  • Research tells us that as an organization matures, the culture tends to become less collaborative. How do you think an organization can prevent this from happening?
  • Tell me about a time when you chose not to collaborate. Why was this? What was the result?