The Real Deal

My Life in Business and Philanthropy

By: Sandy Weill, Judah S. Kraushaar

Narrated by: Harry Chase, Chuck Prince, Sandy Weill

"Shortly after we set up shop, the four of us and our wives convened at Arthur's home on Long Island to celebrate. It was a festive occasion, and we all openly shared our aspirations. To this day, I remember the others stressing over and over their desire to become wealthy. Given that Joanie and I were raising two toddlers and lived nearly hand-to-mouth, the talk was certainly seductive. Still, what I remember most from that dinner was my declaration that the money should be secondary-what mattered more to me was to build a great firm: one that would lead the industry, employ lots of people, endure over many years, and, importantly, command respect. Over the next forty-three years, I never altered my priorities."-- The Real Deal The Sandy Weill story is truly one for the ages. Starting with $30,000 in borrowed cash in 1960, and relying on uncanny entrepreneurial instincts, Sandy created one of the leading securities firms in the U.S. and became one of the best known businessmen in the world. After selling his company to American Express and becoming its president, he experienced a professional setback. Undaunted, he cannily parlayed it into a second career, starting over with a sleepy consumer loan company called Commercial Credit, which over the next seventeen years he transformed into the leading global bank, Citigroup. During this span, Weill as chairman and CEO delivered an astounding 2,600 percent return to investors-better than legendary CEO Jack Welch or investor Warren Buffett during that same period.Yet success is never an easy path, and Weill divulges the highs and lows.

His ascent to power has been documented by the media over the years, but never before has Weill revealed the brutally honest and unvarnished side of an astonishing life and career.And Weill goes further, sharing his love of philanthropy, a journey that took him "from a mediocre bass drummer in my high-school marching band to the chairmanship of Carnegie Hall." He brings readers into his personal life, introducing them to his wife, Joan, his daily inspiration, and discussing his relationships with competitors and colleagues alike, including proteges like Peter Cohen and Jamie Dimon. Along the way, he shares the most important lessons he learned in business and in life.

From a middle-class Brooklyn childhood to corporate legend, philanthropist, financier, and chairman emeritus of Citigroup Inc., The Real Deal tells a remarkable story-that of a financial superstar who always loved the game more than the gold.

Important perspective

Everyone hates on Sandy because of Jaime Dimon’s firing but this book is his view of that and his time before and after. In the end Citi still exists (such as it is) and this is a “story” before the events of the 2008 disaster and since when is an autobiography critical of its author? It really glosses over (ignores?) a lot of things - like what the heck is an investment banker or any financial terms for that matter. But you can’t learn history unless you learn about the participants so read this book

Great business story, well told; ironic now

This story can be taken on many levels. It is a classic USA personal success story. It is a well-told blow-by-blow of an important stretch of business and financial history. But the passage of time has added dimensions unseen and unintended by the author (for whom, make no mistake, I have great personal admiration).
Sanford Weill had big vision and ideas. He was an amazing empire-builder in business. His management tenets are excellent. His "can do" spirit is contagious. His ethics are (in the telling here) to be admired.
But time and history wash over the doings of any person, sometimes with strange ironies and mockeries. USA is a place where business builders (and others, military leaders and so on) scale up ideas to a reach and impact undreamed of. And these things can go awry as time unfolds. I don't necessarily blame (in all cases; I do in some) those who dare and try on this scale. Things are tried, some work, some crash, and ultimately we (or a critical mass of us) have come out pretty darned well.
And that's how I view Weill's corporate masterpiece, the assemblage of Citigroup. This (and the legislation it helped to bring in) later turned out to be the poster child for the modern lumbering "too big to fail" banks that crashed so awfully in 2008, and which We the Peasants got to bail out. We didn't get the estate in Greenwich, we got the degraded part of the economy. It's an old story, and one unsolved to this day. Meanwhile the folks in DC flail at each other and bicker. But hey, I got my affordable home loan from this financial system, and on balance, I am not complaining. I am living my American dream, partly thanks to folks like this.
It is Mr. Weill's misfortune to have published this book (much like Alan Greenspan's 'Turbulence' memoir) basking in the golden light of modern success and adulation right on the eve of the 2008 mess, which completely scrambled those narratives, at least in the popular mind. It is reminiscent of Fisher's mid-1929 proclamation that stocks seemed on a permanently high plateau. Oops. Meanwhile, I come away from this book better informed on business history, and inspired by Mr. Weill's account of it. He has an elegant manner of self-expression, yet compact and descriptive. Some of the folks described would doubtless have a different account -- for example, next up for me is the book here on Weill's onetime protege Jamie Dimon. Sanford Weill doesn't sound terribly high-handed considering who he is and what he did. Oh, and the narration seems (in light of the above later history) kind of ironic itself, inasmuch as it has the punchy sound of an old-time announcer. It goes fine.
As with many books, particularly autobiographies, I know I will get a cherry-picked kind of story. I need many voices to give me perspective. But as such things go, this is one of the better ones.