Over the years there have been many interpretations of the various themes that course through this work. It is surely a well-scripted account of a descent into depression and madness. It is a powerful example of how one person’s mental illness can paralyze themselves as well as an entire business operation.
I do not pretend to have access to the inner sanctums of Wall Street, nor can I peer within the minds of the masterminds. When it comes to the Wall Street debacle du jour, the media invariably distorts the facts, while jailhouse interviews provide conflicting testimony as to what really happened.
I am not so quick to condemn these architects of disaster. However, I think that in the deep recesses of their minds, many of these tail-spinning tycoons must have found themselves in so deep that when the worm turned for them, it must have brought out a bit of the Bartleby in them.
Whether it is Enron or Tyco or Lehman or any number of the smaller implosions that have littered the Street in recent years, when they do the autopsy of the disaster, they invariably identify key turning points where inaction set the company on the path toward disaster.
But it is more than just the Chief Executive. In most instances, all the way down the line there is complicity. Deep inside, they’re just ignoring the warning signs in a desperate hope things may turn around or disaster may be avoided or someone else may swoop in and save the day.
“It can never happen to us.”
All too often, when it comes to self-assessing and facing the hard realities, we are too quick to prefer not to. Psychologically, we have an affinity for the positive. It is human instinct to turn away from bad news.
Further on in the third section of this book where we explore the components of the Wall Street’s Psychologist’s Gyroscope, there is a section entitled: “Developing a Personal Risk Management Strategy.” Within this section, I provide a basic questionnaire that asks you to invest the time to ask yourself the hard questions that, among other things, insures your personal investment philosophy is sound and you do not susceptible to surrendering to fallibilities of your psyche.
Ultimately, this is one more component of the Wall Street Psychologist’s Gyroscope for you to maintain that will lead you down the path of psychological well-being and emotional security.