corporate egos stroked. I remember visiting two different oil companies. I would ask one Chairman a question, and he would pull out the most exquisite stationary, probably a buck a sheet, write a line or two, and casually throw it away to make a point.
A second corporation I visited, a different Chairman when asked the same question, would pull open a draw and take out what appeared to be a stack of used envelopes from previously received mail. He had slit both sides of the envelope and opened it along the fold, thus making a stack of clean stationary from the inside of the envelopes of mail that had been sent to him. I made a fortune on that company’s stock. The other company was out of business in two years. Both were NY Stock Exchange members.
When I was a limited partner at Bear Stearns in the 1980′s, the Chairman Ace Greenberg, made it a point to say he would never allow the company to purchase “paper clips”. He was making a point. There are
