"I’VE NEVER been afraid of hiring people smarter than myself". (Photograph by Thomas Hart Shelby.)

The book, two and a half years in the making, reads in part like an insider’s history of Wall Street since the late 1950s, and in part like an encouraging, though cautionary, tale about the professional and personal rewards—and costs—of assembling, growing and managing a leading business.

Most of the events Weill relates are well known to those who even casually follow the financial industry. While he is clearly out to give his side of these stories—he pulls no punches in his portraits of his former protégés Peter Cohen and Jamie Dimon (now CEO of JPMorgan Chase) and his clashes with Jim Robinson at American Express and John Reed at Citigroup—he is refreshingly frank about his own missteps in managing those relationships.

But Weill remains convinced that the scale and diversification he doggedly pursued, originally through the purchases that created brokerage powerhouse Shearson Loeb Rhoades (which he sold to American Express in 1981) and then through the 12-year M&A spree that brought Primerica, Travelers, Salomon Brothers and Citicorp (among others) under the mantle of Citigroup, remain legitimate objectives. He acknowledges that open architecture has changed the business dramatically, making cross-selling a less compelling motive for building a multiproduct financial conglomerate (which is one reason Citigroup recently traded its asset management division for Legg Mason’s brokerage force). But international scale and product line diversification, he argues, remain justifiable goals because they protect the firm from downturns in any one market.

"The more diversified you are, the better position you are in to handle changes. If there’s a problem in one area, you’ll have offsetting businesses."

However, his enthusiasm for diversification has not been embraced as wholeheartedly by investors. Citigroup’s stock price has meandered between about $45 and $50 for the three years since Weill relinquished the CEO role to Chuck Prince, while the stocks of purer-play financial firms like Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns have skyrocketed, gaining between 50 and 150 percent over that same period.

Scale and Control
Weill’s memoir also can be seen as a study in the difficulties that arise when trying to manage an increasingly large institution. Indeed, it was at the apex of their institutional girth that both of Weill’s creations started to suffer from serious management issues.

After he sold Shearson to American Express, clashes with Robinson and Cohen undermined Weill’s effectiveness, and he eventually resigned. The firm underperformed and ultimately split up; Lehman Brothers, its investment bank, went public, and Shearson, the business Weill built, was purchased by his new company, Primerica. (“I felt like MacArthur returning to the Philippines!” he says.)