Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World. . .and Then Nearly Lost It All (Wall Street Journal Book)

I like business biographies and specifically those concerning investment banking. Sandy Weill's career is so diverse with so many companies turned around that this book is the best I have read in detailing a man's lifetime case study. For those who may not be familiar with Sandy Weill, he started on Wall Street with a small firm as Wall Street was struggling with sheer back-office paperwork and quickly grew that into a force challenging Merrill Lynch. After a merger with American Express, Weill was eventually forced out. He returned to corporate management buying a Baltimore finance company in trouble, Commercial Credit. After merging with Travelers Insurance, Weill eventually merges with Citicorp creating the largest financial institution in the world.What makes this book interesting are the character flaws of Sandy Weill. While he has strengths in cost cutting efficiency, he has many management flaws. Temper management, delegation of authority, public speaking are but a few of the flaws detailed in this book. Of particular interest is his relationship with Jamie Dimon, his long-time younger protégé, who is eventually let go and now runs Bank One.There is one complaint I have with this book. At the takeover of Commercial Credit, there are significant discussions of the changes in management philosophy that are quite interesting. But after significant work and allusion of improvement, no report of financial performance was provided to demonstrate mathematically how positive the improvement was. Obviously, it was significant given the mergers that took place after the turnaround of Commercial Credit.I must compliment the author on a thorough research job. It was clear from the dialog that this book would have been impossible without interviews with many different people including Sandy Weill. I did not find this book tipped to Weill's favor as a "fluff" piece but rather I thought the author balanced the good with the bad.In summary, if you like business summaries dealing with finance you will like this book.

Well-researched and very readable, with great insight into both Sandy Weill and Jamie Dimon. However, this book is more of a narrative of what happened, when it happened, who did it, etc. than it is a consideration of Weill's legacy or the implications of his choices on our current financial system.Part of this weakness is structural: the book was published right before the financial crisis which thoroughly trounced Citi's books and places Weill's backroom dealing against government regulation in a different, very dangerous light. The book also doesn't interrogate Weill's disgust of CapEx investment into technology and data capabilities; co-CEO John Reed's long-term investments into online banking now seem entirely prescient compared to Weill's passion for branches, but this point is not made.However, even when bigger questions could be addressed with the information available at the time, the author stays narrowly focused on sequential storytelling rather than delivering any opinions on questions like "Is all this M&A to create gigantic banks actually good or bad for the end customer? for society?"I recommend this book if you are specifically interested in Sandy Weill, Jamie Dimon, Travelers or Citi, but it is not the best read if you are trying to understand an era, the system or any broader arc of context or complexity.

It is important that a company moves fast enough to adapt to the changes in its environment and one of the characteristics of Sany Weill is that he always led a company that was changing, usually by growing. It should also be stated, to be fair to everyone, that there are a lot of lives that are ruined in such companies of people that get tossed aside and wasted. I liked Sandy Weill as he was described, and have more than once crossed paths with him in my personal account without either one of us being aware of it at the time, probably, (Travellers, Chase) and I think that I offered a lot more of myself than I got for it. The effort away from the top is being used more than it is being valued. This is both as a customer and an employee. Don't get the wrong impression that I'm bitter or not loyal though. I was rooting for him to succeed and closely following his path as I read this account of his career. It is richly interesting and informative. I would recommend this book to anyone that is interested in banking and Wall Street.

I read this book to get some insight into Sandy's right hand man Jammie Diamond who was about to become the CEO of Chase, the company I worked for. I must say that it was so interesting that I could not put the book down. It's a biography that reads like a novel. The world of finance and Sandy's role in it's history is spell binding. Monica Langley did an excellent job writing this book and look forward to reading anything else she's done.If this subject is of any interest to you then you will be glad you took the time to read this book.

Finally, a great biography of a person who isn't in the news anymore. Extremely detailed about the person who used to be, and may be still is, Sandy Weill. His chutzpah hid his flaws balance each other, but not all the time. He grew a small company with people around him falling to the background, somewhere along the way, he fell and then he came back strong.Frankly, the book is not at all technical on financials but is more about the manager, the specialist and the fire inside him. Reading the book is just like watching a movie about Weill. Great read. Buy it.

The book is very well written, detailing Sandy's growth from a start-up securities firm to building the world's biggest financial conglomerate at the time. Highly recommend the reading!

great bookvery well written, as it reads like a novel.

Anyone who wishes to know hwat happened on Wall Street and why it happened will find this book extremely interesting. Greed is the key word and a complete lack of loyalty to their fellow Wall Street gang or even their own families. Very good book.

Sandy Weill's corporate ambition and sheer personal energy attracted financial talent like a magnet. Acolytes, notably Jamie Dimon, tolerated his egocentrism because his drive took them to professional performance levels, as well as the habitats to use their skill, which they might never have discovered on their own. All were spectacularly successful, in terms of money-making and peer-group adulation. Sandy seems to have been as kind as an egocentric can be - and would the ambition from which they all benefited exist without the egocentrism - but, whilst admirable, he does not come across as intrinsically great. He was a product of his environment, even if he helped to shape it a little, since his ambition merely coincided with the Great Consumer Credit Boom, or GCC (1958-2008). A syllogism naturally springs to mind. He and the GCC were mutually inclusive; the GCC has bequeathed an appalling financial burden to posterity; so has Sandy Weill?. In my view, the answer is no, because he lacked the mens rea, even if he unintentionally promoted the actus reus, but I am left left wondering whether I'm being too charitable, because Monica Langley is, especially towards the very end of the book. And then I think I'm being hard on the author, who has weaved countless personal anecdotes into a solid story with real narrative pace. Does this make it OK that the serious global financial turbulence in 1998 and 2001-2, to take two examples, are just ripples mentioned in passing? You decide. It's a great read, but others telling it might find, and choose to emphasise, more negatives.

Tenderly written, and like Oliver Stone’s movie W, blindingly over-affectionate, yet invaluable for a world still grasping to understand the credit crunch and how on earth we got there.I believe the magic in this book is that while Sandy Weill emerges (the publication date is 2004, but his activities are by then 99% done) as a prime candidate for top 10 scapegoat for the 2008 meltdown, each individual chapter reads as a fairly rational piece of behaviour for a brittle, highly ambitious and intelligent man.That man is left, as we know, looking vulnerable on daytime talk shows, mocked as he tries to repent for lobbying for deregulatory changes that many blame for later disaster.As a biography, it also gives much on the finance sector’s descent from a mode of nominal properness to bedlam in the last 40 years.The group-think is especially well-done ... to be charitable, perhaps not every single person participating quite knew, or quite chose to examine closely, how badly as people they were opting to behave, or what would ensue.

The detail of the key characters and companies involved makes this book an enthralling read. In particular there are interesting facts thatsurprise the reader. For example, before General Custer's battle with the Sioux, he took out a Life Insurance with "Travelers" Insurance, who were founded in 1864. This book is a fascinating read for any one interested in business.

interesting how the book read a certain way but I didn't see it that way when I worked there for two years

good book