The first time you watch your office's BSD director walk into a client meeting and, in between grovelling, tell a client flat out bullshit without blinking is a common experience for analysts and associates.
You know he knows he's bullshitting. You know he knows you know he's bullshitting. But he/she doesn't care. And the best directors do this effortlessly and without a hint of self consciousness. And they win business.
I posted in another thread somewhere about some of the signs that I interpret as "this banker is bullshitting me".
Common signs:
- Banker starts a sentence using your name eg "SSits, you've got a really good business here..."
- Cheap or unnecessary flattery eg "SSits, that's a really good question..."
- Throws the analyst/associate under the train whenever a technical question comes up
- When the banker is in negotiations or seeking an approval, banker responds to a legitimate question with anger or outrage, rolls his/her eyes, sighs loudly or otherwise treats the question a ridiculous waste of time
I'm sure others have witnessed this sort of stuff first hand. Does anyone else have common behaviours or stories of this sort of senior banker bullshitting?
I used to work with/for a guy in PE who was the Sr. Partner/Founder of the firm. He was a very intelligent guy but he thought he was so much smarter than anyone else in the world that he could basically pull a Jedi mind trick on everyone if he started explaining things in a very scientific, mathematic or technical way. When he started losing the room-and it could be in negotiations with companies, with investors, regulatory or legal folks, whomever-he'd launch into a massive and long winded diatribe getting into such detail about the technology, or how these sets of laws we're talking about originated in Justinian Code that I'm pretty sure he thought that his technical knowledge of whatever it was would overwhelm anyone else in the room because he was obviously so much smarter than anyone else. I was younger in my career so I couldn't tell him to just shut the f up no matter how much I wanted to, but it was great when someone else would simply call him out on his bullshit and basically tell him to shut the f up.
Utilizing the classic "bullsh*t baffles brains" strategy and failing miserably it sounds like. Another sign is when the same concept, deal experience, example, etc. is repeated ad nauseam. Tell tale sign that they lack decent experience in that product, sector, etc.
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When they start talking, ie words start coming out of mouth
When you hear that you're being promoted to the one year accelerated analyst fast track program.
It was always fun listening to MDs on the phone with clients vs their wives. Night and day.
"We are using very conservative revenue projections"
Bankers often try to conflate their importance. The funniest example of this was at a business dinner where the senior person on a group I used to be in was trying to imply he was in the same league of social status as the client: banker owned a total of five very nice vehicles, but the client had a very large garage filled with Ferarris, Bentleys, Aston Martins, Maseratis, etc... We're talking logarithmic magnitudes of difference in wealth and social standing, but the senior banker kept making it a point to try to convince everyone how important throughout the lunch.
I just remember thinking "please shut up, I'm embarassed to even be here for this" the entire time
Had a partner at my PE fund who would throw out numbers and facts in meetings like they were iron-clad, scientific truth, when in reality most were off, some wildly so. Took me awhile to figure out when to correct him and when to keep my mouth shut because I had to balance (i) getting in trouble later for letting him "accidentally" mislead the other side with (ii) making him look bad by chiming in every 2 minutes with "actually, it's more like..." or undercutting some nefarious negotiating scheme he had hatched.
I don't miss those meetings at all.
My personal favorite is when bankers try and bs management on why a relationship went south... "We're trying to better allocate resources to reflect how we want to prosecute our business" = "Not competitive on deal terms"
"Welcome to the team" that's when you know you've been fucked.
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