Ten years into his leadership of Bank of America, and a quarter of a century in finance, Brian Moynihan has seen it all. The highs of boom times, the sharp lows of the 1990s recession, which he describes as his “graduate school”, and the even darker days of the financial crisis and the lay-offs that followed.
Talking about his personal achievements makes him visibly uncomfortable; instead he attributes his team’s success to being able to “actually walk and chew gum”, a down-to-earth metaphor typical of the 60-year-old Bostonian as he describes the “left brain/right brain” combination needed to grow and invest while at the same time cost cutting and firefighting.
He has a new challenge as he heads into the next decade: making sure the crisis-time lessons of the past aren’t forgotten by him, by his leadership team, or by the many employees among his 200,000 workforce who have known nothing but good times as they built careers during the US’s decade (and counting) of straight economic growth.