Our First Project Together

There’s a street in Shanghai lined solely with seafood restaurants. You can’t miss it: fronting the establishments are enormous fish tanks, filled as a rule with sharks – tasty, they say, and only moderately lethal. It’s an odd, if hunger-provoking lane, and anyone who’s worked in finance will feel the twinge of an atmosphere familiar.

In Moscow, back in 2006 or so, I was working as an equity research editor. The job called for keeping my Byzantine Greek nose to the grindstone, enlivened by the occasional cat herding of willful analysts. I never caused any malarkey and none came my way – until annual report-writing season reared up. Suddenly, the sharks were circling, the crabs clicking claws, the stingrays – you get it. Not open warfare, but the office gods all wanted to lead, and weren’t so sure about sharing the plum duty.

Our chief economist, Peter – the real brains of the operation, I thought – was somehow ruled out. He suggested I take on the task. With friends like these, I thought. As I wasn’t ‘political’ and had the skills, I became the compromise candidate. OK, then – so what do you want me to say? They wouldn’t say. The mere fact of being a power broker’s candidate had suddenly made me suspect.

“What we need is a ringer,” said Peter, who, despite being Swedish, has a sound grasp of the demotic English. I knew just whom to call: Rebecca Baldridge. We’d known each other for years, had traveled together and flashed sparks off our cutlery, had common interests – finance, language, writing – but had never worked together. We finally did, and it worked out pretty well.

We called her in and her personability did the rest. She turned the roiling waters into the show at SeaWorld. The report was a thing of beauty as these things go, Rebecca got paid and booked for the next year, and the office powers learned the joys of swimming in tandem in our glass-walled tank.

This is how our professional partnership began. If we can help you calm the waters, don’t hesitate to call.