On a Friday evening, when you get summoned back to office from a bar to "process" comments - rage knows no boundaries. So while I sat there working like a drone, plotting all sorts of evil to descend on my superiors and the banking industry at large,I was also typing away an email to my boss. The email was actually supposed to say " Please see updated presentation " instead I write " Please feel updated presentation " and hit send.

Note to self : NEVER send emails when livid.

I should have felt upset - but as I sent it and then read the complete absurdity of the message - I thought, well - wat the hell atleast I got a good laugh out of it and I do hope he feels the presentation ..right ...up.. his.. arse ... !

So last week - being extremely unwell, coughing and wheezing - I had to host a conference call so my ED comes online and says - Hi, How are You ...and I respond (sounding like Bane from the Batman series) - Awful, extremely unwell ... so he responds " Aaah, Good Good " ?!!! Why even bother with civilities in this business? Why pretend to even be concerned or remotely interested - why not start the conversation with " Lets get this out of the way and be done with it"  No need for thank yous, please, sorry ... so inefficient - why waste any time at all being ...UGGHH ..POLITE!?

So one would think its only bankers who are heartless - but I dont believe that is true. Anybody who is touched by this profession even remotely loses the ability to empathize and see employees as human beings.

If that wasnt bad enough a particular conversation with HR runs as follows. An employee goes to HR and requests them to switch divisions since this job is taking a toll on his/her health - frequently unwell, stress headaches etc and the person would like to make a move out of IBD.
The HR lady nods most sympathetically and asks " Yes, I understand, but do you have any severe symptoms? I mean anything terminal/ urgent or is this more of a long term plan .... "  As the person looks bewildered, she tries to cover up by mentioning - " No, I mean to ask how urgent this is ..... "
So basically, until you are about to die at work - it is not imperative to move just because you are dissatisfied and demotivated?
If that wasn't bad enough, she tried to figure out how many hours a typical employee works in IBD, she asks " Well, should I say you work from between 12 - 14 hours ..does that sound about right ?"
This is coming from the so-called Human Resource team of  a leading investment bank, who is uninformed about the kind of hours an M&A banker works - the very mainstay of this bank!!

So, while the entire corporate world re-organises itself across employee development, fostering and mentoring future leaders and HR students across the world write pages on retaining and motivating employees - the banking industry focuses on keeping its workforce barely alive.

The trade-off between money and lifestyle at one point of time could almost justify this callous indifference (inexcusable as it maybe) but as regulation clamps down and as the industry itself goes through tectonic shifts, perhaps now is a good time as any to start nurturing some talent OR hiring simians for the job at hand.

Back after a long hiatus, one would think I found a new job but alas not so and trust me I tried! So its back to writing for me.

I have just joined a new team and was for a brief period of time lulled into a fake sense of security that - hey, this is not bad - perhaps I can actually do this and then BOOM! you get staffed on a project where you get killed and suddenly you realise that it still is as bad. I was told that my new team is a " lifestyle " team and I happily accepted it. Ya, sure you leave a bit early - midnight instead of later but hey, that is a certain type of " lifestyle" after all....... Moral of the story - different people, same BS.

But more importantly, this post is about the holy grail of what most investment bankers toil day and night for apart from the big fat bonus - something called Closing Dinners & Tombstones. So for the unaware - the closing dinner is usually a VERY fancy dinner at the expense of the client to celebrate the holy matrimony of merging two unrelated companies together under the promise of attaining something mysteriously called as synergies. A tombstone is usually a fancy trophy provided to every soul who sacrificed their life in conducting that marriage and is usually a mark of a banker's legacy and prowess (More tombstones = no life).

So picture this setting - A fancy 2 Michelin starred restaurant with a waiting list of usually 6 months is booked completely for all the advisors (read glorified pimps) to gather together and  feel smug in their glory.  So what you do find is a lot of people in black suits, nervously fumbling blackberry's while trying to appear comfortable in a formal setting and having to actually converse with human beings and not a desktop. The Big Kahuna's - the MD's obviously appear to be prattling away with other bigwigs with effortless ease while the rest of the folks hang around the fringes of their conversation pretending to " act cool" and nodding and laughing in unison.

I had earlier decided to break the monotony of black by wearing green hoping that the women in other banks use their sartorial sense by wearing color to a formal dinner, unfortunately even the women believe they should dress like they are attending a funeral OR confuse themselves as semi-male. So this resulted in me sticking out like someone planted a christmas tree in the middle of the room and turned the lights on.

If the social awkwardness of all this is not enough to make you cringe - then they have seating plans! So how this works is the tables are numbered from 1-7 and you can guess which tables the analysts and the associates are seated on. Someone also did the courtesy of placing against table number 1 - Very Important Persons as if ensure that the Very Unimportant People (hereby called as V.U.P's) are instantly repelled.  Now, even between them, there is hierarchy so tables 2-5 are the mediocre V.U.P's - the ED's and VP's. (Infact my manager actually decided to announce the glaringly obvious fact to all and sundry - " Aaah, see they seated us as per designation, how clever....)

Obviously tables 6-7 are the Associates and the Analysts - if our designations and workload is not menial enough - yes, please by all means, invite us for dinner and then insult us even further by segregating us, what next - different cutlery (silver for MD's and plastic for analysts) and toilets?!!

If that was not bad enough, Sir I-am-Chairperson-of-the-company-paying-for-tonight told us that life is not about buying and selling companies but about producing, creating something and making a decent,honest living. Everyone applauded and looked at him a bit confused trying to figure out if he just praised us or shafted us!

In the end, we all finished our very pretentious meals with horribly small portions, received our tombstones in what suspiciously looked like mini-caskets and left - just happy to get an excuse for a free evening and we all lived happily(??) ever after.

So they fired one of my favourite bosses last week.  He was widely known as one of the nicest people in the bank, whose style of working was so relaxed that there would be a queque of people ready to work with him. Largely pain-free and never the one to create additional work, it was mostly a stress-free experience to work for him.

So clearly, the process of being and staying as MD is quite self-selecting - the nicer you are, the less likely you are to survive. What about the plethora of political a$%holes posing as " senior management" OR the paranoid and pyschotic micro-managers who if they could would track with you a GPS and plant a camera in your ass for good measure - When are they ever asked to leave?

The bank's excuse is if you are not bringing in money, we are not doing charity. Fair enough - when these MD's are being paid the equivalent of a small fortune, you better be milking some gullible fool who is commonly called as a " client".

However, how about giving equal weightage in performance evaluation to leadership, team management and mentoring skills? Surely, to be a senior executive, people skills are as relevant, where employee engagement and motivation should be as important as retaining your clients.

In an environment where we work as hard as we do, it is almost shocking but I have not had even one conversation with any of my line managers about my " career path" or " goal -setting" or " developmental plan".  Whatever limited conversations you do have are fleeting, cursory and a mere formality. Consequently, when you see the few role models that you could try and emulate get fired, your motivation to stick around is severely reduced.

As one MD rightly hung a poster on his wall saying " I work for money, if you want loyalty - get a dog." 

Now this post is to understand & evaluate why there are such few women in the world of M&A - this is a question which has perplexed me for the longest time I have been here.

The adverse sex-ratio in a bank such as mine is not new or uncommon. However, with all the talk on breaking glass ceilings and ensuring women rise to the top, there is very little done to retain female talent. While recruiting in business school, there is definitely a big push to recruit more female Associates, that being said - that does not mean a less qualified woman would be hired over a man. It merely means that between two equally qualified candidates - being a woman could give you a slight advantage in a banking interview.

However, once you join it is a level playing field - sometimes a bit too level.  There are certain traits that I observed about the women who make it to senior management in an investment bank - a) they are extremely aggressive and dominating b) there is an obvious effort to subdue their femininity and c) they tend to be harsher and less empathetic than their male counterparts.

This I think stems from an inherent need to succeed in an testosterone - fueled environment, where any weakness or any display of feminine traits are seen as you being less capable or not up to the challenge. In order to succeed as a banker particularly in M&A - the sacrifices and hours that a person needs to put in to climb the proverbial ladder to success is I think physically and emotionally taxing particularly for a woman. After a point of time- she starts to think marriage, kids and of slowing down - which is a complete anti-thesis to being a cut-throat banker.
Not to say it can't be done - there are a few examples of women who made it to MD level albeit with an army of nannies and having multitude of stay-at-home husbands.

The question that begs to be asked if whether - can we ever have a Marissa Mayer type woman lead an Investment Bank, who embraces her femininity and carries her pregnancy as a talisman while steering a Fortune 500 company? For all talk about banks being equal opportunity employers - probably not!! 

An interesting incident at work is the inspiration for two posts in the same day. So, there was a fire scare in office today with the lady over the PA system going berserk claiming " There is a fire in the building, please note, there is a fire in the building ". The range of reactions from the zombies at work was between mild curiosity & indifference to utter disregard while they continued to dial away on conference calls, toil away on excel sheets and change chart colors on power point slides.

After 5 minutes of the unrelenting fire alarm - I look over at the only other sane person in the bank (my dear partner in crime), we decide that our lives are too precious to be wasted on asphyxiation and we decided to walk out of the building. On the way, being good samaritans, we also urged other co-workers/drones to perhaps heed to the incessant instructions. Some of the interesting responses that we got were - Cant you see I am in the middle of something or even better - You guys go ahead, I need to send something out.  Those last words were accompanied with a patronizing eyeball roll and " God, these guys are paranoid". 

So once we got out of office and made our way to the bar on exactly the other side of our famed building, we positioned ourselves with beers to patiently await the scenes of utter disaster since this was clearly the most exciting thing to happen to us all year. 

Imagining complete destruction and actually thinking - perhaps some people did need some good ol smoke up their arses, we played out dramatic scenes of bankers jumping out of the building, making jokes about fire marshals not willing to save us since we were not " innocent civilians" , wat we would do if someone was choking - the common consensus was that it depend on who was choking .... 

Alas, it just happened to be a false alarm - eventually, we all trooped back to office albeit a bit disappointed but clearly relieved to have a pretext for a drink at 4 pm on an idle Wednesday afternoon .... Such is  the high-rolling lives of bankers .....

" Oh, it was my birthday last week and I totally forgot " that beautiful phrase was uttered by a VP at work. While the rest of us stared at him in shocked silence, he said it with a small frown on his face as if contemplating the sheer futility and inconveniences of occasions such as birthdays, weddings and funerals. But the sad part of that statement was not that he forgot his own birthday but the fact that NOBODY else remembered it either !!! Not your own parents, your partner, close friends - no one remembered or bothered to call to even remind you - now that is truly depressing. It is an incredible feat to have an existence so isolated from people that not one person on this planet wanted to celebrate the day you were put on this earth !

So today's discussion was on introducing awards for the " Most Screwed Up Banker" - they would be named after recently deposed CEO's or out of favor Chairmans such as " The Bob Diamond award" or " Jamie Dimon Badge of Honor". Criteria for nomination would be ranging from - least amount of integrity,highest level of dishonesty, exemplary levels of social awkwardness, intellectual limitations, lowest levels of EQ, complete lack of leadership skills etc etc. I would nominate the above featured banker as a front runner but by all means, he will not be alone - he will be in esteemed company since there are many who would comfortably qualify for these awards. It will be a competitive process and a truly nail-biting race to the finish.

However, thats not to say that everyone in the bank is devoid of social skills - there are some duly charismatic, socially adept and highly intelligent bankers out there. There are also some junior bankers as well who want to essay the roles of leaders and take it upon themselves to practise their new found leadership skills on you. Some of them will utter real gems of wisdom in their attempts to motivate you out of your stupor - they almost see themselves as Messiah's guiding you to the holy land when they say things like

1. You are my flock and it is my job to take care you
2. I am your protector - so never fear to approach me. If you dont talk to me - I cant help you
3. If I could instill your values in every person in this firm, the world would be a better place
4. I can place my hand on my heart and assure you that you are one of the most valuable resources that we have
5. Life has a real design for you - but dont fight it, put your head down and work through these tough times

Now all of the above have been said when these people have screwed you over in some way or the other and they obviously confuse you for having the mind-space of a goldfish or a potted plant.

It is incredibly amusing to see how the people who work in instititions such as mine have enveloped themselves so completely in this bubble. I guess when you spend so much time at work - it is but natural(?) to allow yourself to be so completely consumed. Some ofcourse are more susceptible than others.

For the last 2 weeks I have been leaving at 7 pm and sometimes (gasp!!) even 5 pm in the evening (function of not being staffed) - I discovered there is a whole world out there - surprise surprise! It is wonderous to see the life through the eyes of  "regular " people. It truly is a novel experience ......

This week is the dreaded lay-over week. Business is bad, the bank is not making money and we are not doing any deals. Looking at the current macro-economic environment that hardly seems surprising. But ofcourse we will still run to all and sundry to pitch all sorts of possible alternatives - restructure your company, buy this company, sell this business, IPO that division. Some of the most outlandish suggestions have ranged from a merger of 2 tech giants or the IPO of a cash cow of a large utilities business or a reverse merger where very small companies should buy completely unrelated assets which they ofcourse cant afford!

But it is amusing - the bank is debating laying off people this week but at the same time is spending thousands of dollars installing "facilities monitors " which tells employees when the next toilet inspection is due and when the kitchen will be cleaned - yes, this is something which will dramatically improve the quality of my life. This is such a preposterous waste of money - I am tempted to send this example to Scott Adams to feature in the next Dilbert issue.

So, nowadays, the much repeated game around the associate class is " Who Will Be Fired" where it seems like getting fired is almost like a reward. Oft repeated sentences are " that guy does NOTHING the whole day - why does he deserve the redundancy package - this is so unfair !!" or " I have worked my ass off and they refuse to me fire me - I want the severance !!"  The reason why everybody covets this redundancy is two fold - 1) you get three months pay tax free and 2) you get a 3 month vacation under the guise of looking for future employment

Now, ofcourse this by no means is to disrespect all those folks who have families and liabilities - where losing their jobs is equivalent of a death knell. However, this above mentioned perverse stream of thought is exacerbated by the sense of absolute desperation and frustration of working here - where the idea of being paid to leave is such a pleasant idea that suddenly everyone wants to grab the " low hanging fruit".

I am told repeatedly by people who dont work in the bank - that I have been blessed to get the job I have, that I am in a luxury position, that there are millions of people who would die to do the same role - thats when I have to ask myself - Have I lost the sense to be thankful for all that I have? Have the daily frustrutions made me numb to all the good things in my life, Had I been unemployed - would I have envied those dark suits trudging to work everyday ? Is this really the worst that can happen to someone ?

Maybe not .... but if you simply look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs - these organisations meet your two basic needs - physiological and safety needs , everything on top of it - relationships, friendships, free time, sense of respect, recognition, space for creativity etc is all up for grabs ....So is there is a real basis to our unhappiness ... Maybe yes .....