My decision to pursue a career in international affairs evolved from a growing sense that the financial-services industry is very much at the center of the phenomenon known as globalization and that the global environment is as precarious as it is exciting. The financial and economic stakes for capital-rich nations and those that are newly discovering the complexities of market-based management of public and private funds could not be higher. As finance, politics, technology-driven markets, and world-class personalities increasingly intersect on a virtually cosmic scale, successful navigation and management of key points of contact is essential. Equally, because for so many people around the world daily experience is profoundly contingent and the environment they occupy is by turns fragile and threatening, the costs of failing the test of geopolitical navigation are difficult to overestimate.
I believe that my background as a finance executive positions me well to contribute to (1) making foreign policy and (2) making foreign policy work. On my record is a pattern of tapping the potential of financial markets and assets and nurturing their growth and productivity--for example at Muirfield Capital recruiting a management staff that assisted me in building a $10-million asset base into $400 million within two years. On my mind throughout that time--as was true of many of my professional colleagues in New York--was the legacy of 9/11, which supplied strong motivation for our team to get our financial-management projects right and to double our efforts to be productive and creative because we felt that the financial industry had been targeted and because so much had been lost.
But 9/11 resonated well beyond the somewhat rarefied environment of investment banking and finance--even finance on a global scale. It vividly brought home to me just how important making sense of world conditions as a whole is and how important it will be to t...