Is There Life After Work? - The New York Times
“All those years ignoring my husband and the toxic assets accumulating on Lehman’s balance sheet just didn’t work out how I would have liked,” wrote former Lehman CFO Erin Callan in Sunday’s New York Times.
With the recent interest in Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, the disgraced Lehman executive decided to jump on the bandwagon with advice of her own. “I always tell my employees to ‘Lean In’ to jobs they are woefully unqualified for,” Callan said in an interview Monday, “and one day they too might wind up complicit in only several thousand counts of securities fraud.”
Callan’s own success at dissolving trillions of dollars of wealth had humble beginnings. She started at Lehmen as a tax lawyer earning only “mid” six figures while lacking any training in accounting. “I didn’t get side-tracked by relevant education that might prevent a financial meltdown.”
Yet a career destabilising the foundation of our market economy started taking its toll on the young professional. Callan began spending evenings doing positively nothing to reign in the destructive semi-legal proprietary trading she was in charge of preventing. “It starts small: one day you miss yoga and bankrupt Greece. But pretty soon you’re working on a Sunday and doing irrevocable damage to the productive capacity of dozens of nations.”
Despite such long hours of incompetence, the bank insisted on paying her tens of millions of dollars. “Everyone knows blonde women who cause planetary disaster are not treated well in finance. I hoped it would get better over time.”
But it got worse. “I remember in 2007 they started calling me the c-word,” she said, referring to her title of CFO. “I used to cry in the bathroom.”
Finally in 2008, Lehman rudely terminated Callan’s employment when the bank ceased to exist.
Since the crisis, Callan’s life has taken humbler trappings. After flipping a Manhattan apartment for a $6 million profit and settling into a $4 million home in East Hampton, her newly-modest lifestyle has elicited sympathy from the multi-billionaires living next door. Some have called for better treatment of women who bankrupt a nation.
“I see her hanging out at the yacht club–without a yacht,” said neighbor Baron de Rothschild III.
“It’s like that Rosa Parks lady,” added his wife, incorrectly.
As she turns 47, the prospect of having children and not destroying dreams has lately been on Callan’s mind. “I’m much more in tune with who I am these days,” she wrote in an e-mail from her winter home in Florida, “and I’ve learned that I would rather be a mom than a despised social pariah. I wish I realized this earlier, before I wasted my childbearing years forcing hundreds of thousands of children into crushing poverty.”
Callan now warns young women starting out in their careers to be careful about achieving balance and not melting down the global financial system.
“This lesson cost investors $15 trillion worldwide, but the cost to me has been incalculable.”