The Yellow Pad: Making Better Decisions in an Uncertain World - Hardcover

Rubin, Robert E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593491394 ISBN 13: 9780593491393

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Robert Rubin, former secretary of the Treasury and co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, shares thoughts on decision-making developed over more than six decades in markets, business, government, and politics, and offers readers an astute and original guide for navigating uncertain times

In 1958, as a college sophomore, Robert Rubin took a class that changed his life. The class was introduction to philosophy, and the professor, Raphael Demos, instilled in his students an idea that was simple yet profound: There is no such thing as certainty. For Rubin, this led to a critically important question: How can we make sound decisions in a fundamentally uncertain world?

While serving in some of the most significant roles in markets, business, and government, Rubin has grappled with that question. Time and again, when faced with a high-stakes decision, he turned to his most trusted tool: a simple yellow legal pad. Rubin’s yellow pad (or more recently, his iPad) became an expression of a larger decision-making philosophy that has both lasted and shaped a lifetime. In The Yellow Pad, Rubin lays out that philosophy with depth and detail, and presents a compelling intellectual framework for confronting some of the most difficult issues we face today.

The Yellow Pad contains a former Treasury secretary’s approach to economic policymaking. A former Goldman Sachs senior partner’s approach to personal investing and understanding risk. A former director of the National Economic Council’s approach to managing people in both private- and public-sector organizations. And much more. Yet despite his lifetime of experiences, Rubin remains refreshingly open-minded, interested in exploring ideas rather than promoting ideologies. With its combination of wisdom and relevance, The Yellow Pad is an essential guide for anyone looking to make better decisions in life, work, and public policy.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert E. Rubin served as the 70th U.S. Treasury Secretary from 1995 to 1999, after serving as the first director of the White House National Economic Council. In these roles, he helped achieve the first federal budget surplus in a generation, address international financial crises, and resolve a debt-ceiling standoff, among much else. Rubin is the author of In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington, a New York Times bestseller. He spent twenty-six years at Goldman Sachs, rising to co-senior partner, and was a senior counselor and board member at Citigroup. He currently serves as counselor to the independent investment advisory firm Centerview Partners, as co-chairman emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, and as chair of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Rubin is a founder of The Hamilton Project, at the Brookings Institution, which promotes broad-based economic growth. A former member of the Harvard Corporation, he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude and from Yale Law School.

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• Chapter I •

Reacting VERSUS Responding

The invitation was written on lined, three-hole-punched paper. The handwriting was tidy, with every letter an identical height, signed by someone named Shadeed Wallace-Stepter.

"I know you're a very busy dude," it read. "But if you can ever find the time I want to formally invite you to San Quentin."

That's how I ended up giving a talk in a California state prison.

During my career, I've entered plenty of intimidating buildings, from the White House and the Capitol to Wall Street banks and corporate headquarters. Still, visiting San Quentin was different. A massive stone fortress overlooking San Francisco Bay, the prison has housed some of our country's most notorious figures over the years. More than any place except Alcatraz Island, San Quentin is synonymous with the American penitentiary. It was impossible not to feel the building's symbolic weight.

Before our arrival, my wife, Judy, and I were told which colors we could wear-different types of people were required to dress in different colors for easy identification. Upon arriving at the gate, we emptied our pockets and were checked for weapons by guards in green uniforms, who then took us to a large room filled with incarcerated men dressed in blue pants and blue shirts. After being introduced (and after Judy recovered my speech, which I had dropped on the floor while walking to the stage), I addressed a room filled with men who had been convicted of serious crimes: murder, drug dealing, and armed robbery, to name just a few.

Initially, I must admit, I had not been sure that agreeing to the invitation was a good idea.

I wasn't troubled, in a moral sense, about speaking to people who had committed crimes. It is my firm belief that we are all flawed. That view, coupled with my dislike for absolutes, means that while I have no problem thinking of individuals' actions as good or bad, I don't tend to sort people that way. Some people do serious and even terrible harm to others, and I believe that one of society's important functions is to protect people and appropriately punish those who violate our laws. But I also believe that the lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson, who has advocated on behalf of dozens of people sentenced to death, put it well when he wrote, "Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done."

My concern in speaking at San Quentin was not with my audience, but with me. I worried that my story would simply not hold the attention of the people there. How could a debt crisis in Mexico or lessons learned at the risk arbitrage desk of an investment bank be of interest to men living behind bars? How could the challenges I'd faced on Wall Street or at the Treasury Department relate to the struggles they had gone through? I feared my experience might be alien to them-that they might find whatever I had to say irrelevant or, even worse, off-putting, as though I were trying to say my experiences were identical to theirs.

What changed my perspective was a phone call I had a few weeks before my visit, which was set up by Delia Cohen, the organizer who planned the event. Shadeed, the letter writer who invited me (and who goes by "Sha"), was part of our discussion, along with several other incarcerated men.

Our conversation lasted an hour and twenty minutes. I took five pages of notes. As we talked, something dawned on me. I had spent time with many different kinds of people in my life. Yet I had rarely encountered a group as thoughtful and reflective, a group so willing to accept and engage with complexity, as the men I spoke with on that call.

Most impressive was how forthright these men were about the crimes they had committed, and how deeply they had considered the consequences of their actions. I was particularly struck by the way one man analyzed the decision-making that had led him to that point, describing what he had learned and how he hoped to behave differently in the future.

"We shouldn't react," he said. "We should respond."

To react, he elaborated, is to make a decision based on a split-second, emotionally charged impulse. Responding, on the other hand, involves thought and patience. It requires stepping back to consider the situation and the potential consequences of one's actions.

This man who had brought up reacting and responding-someone who was serving a long prison sentence for felony murder-understood something that eludes countless policy-makers, investors, and CEOs. If we want to make better choices regarding our lives, our economy, our country, and, ultimately, the criminal justice system itself, I can think of no better prescription than the one he offered on the phone.

We shouldn't react. We should respond.


In the Clinton White House, one of the speechwriters was a young man named Jonathan Prince. He was very bright, with a rare ability to think through problems and express the solutions. Among Jonathan’s insights was a phrase he coined, “extreme disruption.”

This was years before Silicon Valley made the word "disruption" its own and turned it into a cliché. What Jonathan meant was something closer to what most of us would call a crisis. But the importance of his language was that it captured the dynamic that underlies so many crises. In moments of extreme disruption, circumstances change dramatically in a relatively short period of time. In most situations, decision-makers can rely on experience to help them make the best possible choices. But in moments of extreme disruption, experience becomes far less helpful because so much has changed so quickly.

Moments of extreme disruption can be very different, depending on the circumstances. The people I spoke to in San Quentin described fights breaking out or robberies gone wrong. One incarcerated man I later spoke with told me that together, a group of twenty-eight incarcerated men had tried to quantify the personal cost of their decisions in such moments. In total, they concluded, crimes that had taken 4 minutes and 26 seconds to commit had resulted in prison terms that added up to 715 years. These men had reacted rather than responded, with permanent consequences for both the victims and perpetrators of their crimes.

Most of us, myself included, have little experience with such dramatic or violent moments of disruption. Yet everyone I know has experienced extreme disruption in their own lives.

Some of these moments are quite literally instants, when everything changes in a split second. On other occasions, the "moments" can take weeks, months, or years, but nonetheless are periods of rapid and intense change. As individuals, organizations, nations, and societies, we inevitably encounter occasions where the situation changes quickly, threats become more dangerous, and the way forward becomes unclear. Today, even younger people are familiar with such moments: they lived through 9/11, the Great Recession, a global pandemic, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, all within roughly a two-decade span.

Unfortunately, these moments of extreme disruption are precisely the kinds of circumstances that often lead to bad decisions.

To use just one example, shortly after Donald Trump was elected president, a friend of mine, who generally has very sensible judgment, sold all of his stocks and mutual funds. In retrospect that may seem like an overreaction, but at the time his motivations were, broadly speaking, understandable. Like many people, myself included, he worried that an unstable president could precipitate a stock market crash.

But my friend nevertheless made a mistake in reacting to Trump's election, and exploring the nature of this mistake helps illustrate the usefulness of thinking probabilistically.

At a moment of extreme...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593491394
• ISBN 13: 9780593491393
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland