The satirical memoirs of a managing director in an investment bank

Ten days before the offsite, Tunde sent me the costed plan. The total at the bottom was forty-two thousand one hundred pounds. That was four thousand one hundred pounds over Hugo's number.

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A lesser leader would have gone to Hugo and asked for more money. I did not. I have always believed I would have made an excellent CFO. A true CFO does not increase the budget. A true CFO reallocates.

So I ran what Oliver calls a zero-based review, which I understand to mean starting from zero and working towards the Burgundy.

Then I found line fourteen.

Line fourteen was called Team Gift (biennial). I had to ask Tunde what it was. He explained that every two years, the London office gives every member of staff a small branded gift, as a thank-you. In 2022 it had been a golf umbrella. This year Priya had chosen a quarter-zip fleece with the Harcourt Lyle logo on the chest, at six pounds forty a unit. The line came to one thousand nine hundred and twenty pounds.

I cut it. Or rather, I re-phased it into the next capital cycle.

I will not pretend it was easy. I thought about the three hundred people who would not receive a fleece, and I felt the weight of it. But I also thought about the Burgundy. A fleece is something you forget about within a week, whereas a truly great wine is something you remember for the rest of your life. Twenty-two people remembering it is, if you think about it, a memory held in trust for the other three hundred.

I told Hugo about it that afternoon. Hugo listened. Then he said, "Richard, a CFO would have cut the leadership dinner."

I said, "And that, Hugo, is the difference between a CFO and a leader."

Priya asked me how she should tell the office that there would be no fleece this year. I suggested sustainability. A fleece, when you think about it, is essentially plastic. Priya wrote the email. It was one sentence long. I added our ESG commitments, a reference to Scope 3, which I took to be something to do with recycling, and sent it from my own account, so that it would carry weight.

I received eleven replies. Nine were out-of-office messages. One was from a man in compliance asking whether the reallocation had been approved by the sustainability committee, which I did not know we had. The last was from Dennis. It said: No problem Richard, I've still got the umbrella.

I thought that was a good attitude, and I forwarded it to HR as an example of resilience.

Great Work, Richard is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback. The author has over 10 years' experience in investment banking. Richard Ashworth-Hale is a pseudonym

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