“You don’t look like an institutional finance guy,” they’d say. Especially when my hair was blue.
Or people would look at the books behind me on Zoom and judge the book reader by their covers.
But here’s why I love working in this space, despite appearances.
Because what you need to develop effective institutional thought leadership is a fearless eye for complexity. It’s what helps make this industry especially apt for thought leadership.
You need to grapple with macroeconomic trends, market dynamics, tech ecosystems, regulatory trends, organizational change, and the psychology of institutional decision-making.
You need to go toe-to-toe with industry leaders and ask them tough questions about why they think what they think and how it is different from conventional wisdom.
You need to untangle all that complexity, all those insights, and turn them into crisp, elegant, readable prose.
Institutional finance isn’t the only complex industry, but it’s the only one with this particular combination of complicating factors.
Being visibly unconventional and having a weird library might not make me the only person who can handle it, but relentless curiosity certainly doesn’t hurt.
