Personality and Work Style
Critics of Cohn attribute to him an arrogant, aggressive, abrasive and risk-prone work style. They see his "6-foot 3-inch & 220 lbs" as intimidating, as he might "sometimes hike up one leg, plant his foot on a trader's desk, his thigh close to the employee's face and ask how markets were doing" According to former Bear Stearns Asset Management CEO Richard Marin, Cohn's arrogance is at the root of the problem.
When you become arrogant, in a trading sense, you begin to think that everybody's a counterparty, not a customer, not a client.Cohn's supporters see these qualities as advantages. Michael Ovitz, co-founder and former chairman of Creative Artists Agency and former president of The Walt Disney Company, stated that he is impressed of Cohn. Ovitz said:
He’s a trader. He has that whole feel in his body and brain and fingertips.”Ovitz sees Cohn's toughness as a "positive” value, explaining that a high ranking executive can’t be “all peaches and cream.”
Donna Redel, who was Chairman of the Board of the New York Mercantile Exchange when Cohn worked there as a silver trader, remembers Cohn as “firm,” “strategic” and “driven.” Martin Greenberg, her predecessor, said Cohn "was tough,” and added that “Gary got in with the right people, worked his ass off and used his head.”
Read more about this topic: Gary Cohn (businessman)
Famous quotes containing the words personality and, personality, work and/or style:
“Personality and mind, like moustaches, belong to a certain age. They are a deformity in a child.... Leave his sensibilities, his emotions, his spirit, and his mind severely alone. There is the devil in mothers, that they must provoke personal ... response from their infants.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Every work of art changes its predecessors.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)