A Great Banker Thought Latin Was Better Training Than Finance

Siegmund Warburg, the merchant banker, puzzled his banking associates when he admitted he took more pride in his grounding in ancient texts and in English and German letters than in his banking skill.

He valued the classical schooling he had. He thought schoolroom Greek and Latin prepared a young banker better than courses in markets, management, or economic theory. Studying the ancients, he argued, taught clear reasoning and a knack for grasping a document fast and getting its meaning right.

A chapter on Warburg opens with the line: "Progress in thinking is progress towards simplicity." For him, powerful thought was lucid thought, not tangled thought. Simplicity combined with thoroughness had helped him, the book says, "more than anything else in life."

That shaped what he read and what he refused to read. He spent weekends with history and philosophy, and with novels and verse he loved enough to reread. He steered clear of business magazines and most daily papers, having decided years earlier that habitual skimming of headlines wore away recall. When people asked how a modern banker could get along without close study of politics and markets, Warburg answered: "I keep my ears open. People tell me everything that's important."

He was an enthusiastic nonconformist who wanted to be right and did not mind being different. He refused to staff himself with flatterers and insisted on hearing dissent in the room. Influence, he said, mattered more than power.

His organization reflected what he called youth and team spirit. By youth he meant men in their late 20s, and he hunted for sharp juniors with the zeal other wealthy men reserved for art collecting. He called youth "the greatest strength of our firm."

He trained them through what he called the nursery principle. A junior always had to sit in on big meetings, then write a long account of what happened. Warburg marked up the draft line by line like a schoolmaster, because, as he put it: "the good lord lives in the detail." He had no patience with people who did not know their job, and the book's account says his organization worked "almost with the precision of a Swiss watch."

He rarely enjoyed winning for long. A day later, while colleagues were still celebrating, he was worrying again. New ideas, he liked to say, are "the bloodstream of a merchant bank."

He prized two pieces of advice. One was among the best he had ever received: "if you have to choose which way to go, always ask yourself first which is the harder and choose that one. It will be the right choice." The other came from his mother. She told him: "Before you pray, my child, ask yourself what you did wrong today and could have done better."