The year ahead of us seems fuller of promises than the year just gone. Impact on the world and impact on our-selves is the self-imposed brief for 2014, and I am ready to travel east, west, north and south. Imagine my surprise, when my very first encounter happened in the heart of London.
A man after my own heart, François Langlade-Demoyen manages elegantly to embrace what common opinion will find contradictory – numbers and words.
He is the writer of wonderful novels such as Les vies sauvées d’Alexander Vielski and La Cassure, and is also the prolific chief investment officer of Pamplona’s fund of hedge funds.
A Chevalier des Arts, and distinguished by France’s National Order of Merit – the equivalent of a British OBE – Francois’s career has focused on developing a US-inspired capital market model in the French system, with the result that Paris has competed with international financial centres. When I managed to get a slot on his busy agenda, I was eager to bombard him with a million questions, particularly: What does writing bring to your role as an investment officer, what does investing bring to your writing, and – most interesting of all – what could you give up?
Writing for investing – obstructing or transcending?
Transcending – definitely. There is more commonality between writing and finance than people think.
Writing requires two fundamental qualities – dis-cipline and structure. I always smile internally when people ask me about my writing. You can see in their eyes the appeal of the glamorous side of it – publication and promotion. What they do not seem to fully comprehend is what it takes to write. Any creation process come with an extraordinary level of sacrifice and selflessness, almost like a priesthood. The hours it requires, the time invested in it. I always say to any writer wannabe: “You want to become a writer? Then write, and write and write again, anything, anywhere, anyhow.”
Work, research, read, analyse, never settle for anything less than upmost curiosity for things. Then ultimately, you will be ready, you will have a chance to create.
When I think about being a financier, the above also rings true. What qualities are required to become a great financier? You need strong analytical skills, the abilities to see connections, patterns where others do not. Any financier should invest a lot of time in researching and analysing, challenging. It is the identical, highly rigorous process of getting information, reflecting and then finally acting that a writer will follow.
Building a portfolio of investment mirrors the start a new novel. I am focusing on quantitative data. Research and analyses occupy my day. Numbers and what they mean prevail and I spend quite a bit of time digging, looking at all angles. I believe my being a writer helps a lot because I never tire of this particular part of the exercise. Being on a continuous path of learning is always fulfilling to me. Then comes the qualitative part, the meeting with the duly selected fund manager. At this stage, I think the writer completely overtakes the financier. A writer is merely a catalyst for some-thing bigger that goes through him or her to come to light. A writer needs to go inside himself and let the characters talk to him, live through him. He needs to balance this inherent curiosity for others, and the ability to listen, to receive, to be fed. The writer trumps the financier in the capacity to listen and observe. Joseph Conrad put it beautifully: “A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.” This quote is always on my mind. Every fund manager becomes a fellow man to observe and empathise with. I am observing a fellow man, and gen-tly looking for the subtle signs that would tell me how he would, say, handle pressure, what is his motivation, his appetite for risk, and his curiosity.
There is a fantastic anecdote. Pierre Moscovici – the current finance minister – was on an official trip to Ireland. While his entourage was reading the official brief full of statistics and facts, he was reading a James Joyce novel. When asked why, he answered: “Because literature and culture will tell you more about human nature, and this is who we will be meeting – people.” This sums it up for me. Writing, being a writer, helps me find the person behind the fund manager. Only by getting interested in the person would I be able to come to a conclusion when it comes to investing in the hedge fund or not.
Investing for writing – depressing or elevating?
That is an interesting way of putting it. Investing is definitely elevating, at least for the sheer array of people I meet for investment purposes. This is the potting soil of characters, the joyfulness or the intensity of this person, the grace, the aura of this other, the capacity for reasoning of this third, and I can go on and on.
As a writer, you have to slide into other people’s shoes. You develop the capacity to see through their eyes, to feel through their heart. You think through their head. At times you give them another life, you invent for them another life. It is the double ability to take a part of reality and transcend it. You look for one voice, the one, the two, the three, the 20 different voices needed for as many of your characters. To create voices, you need one simple thing – to live, live and live to the fullest. Rainer Rilke is hands down my favourite author of all times, for the complexity of his writing, the beauty and the tragedy it expresses. He cap-tures what I am try-ing to say this way: “To write a single line you must have seen many cities, men and things.’’ In essence the experience of human nature is essential to writing.
When I depict Alexander Vielski’s first day at the Lubyanka [KGB headquarters in Moscow], I am physically the person walking down the streets of Moscow to the omi-nous office, or taking the train to Batumi, a charming town in Georgia. I put in him a bit of this, a bit of that, and I never know what comes next. I let the journey take over. The term of reference I am building, the inventory of human traits I have at my disposal because of the invest-ment world, is amazingly rich and I could probably not go on without it.
Writing or investment – if there was only one to keep? This is Sophie’s choice. I will have to keep both, always and forever.
Investing is thrill giving, intellectually rewarding and totally addictive. You are pushing the intellectual exercise to the limit, trying to control or make sense of the most uncontrollable events. Bottom line, you pick your person, and you see him at times perform, at times trigger doubt. Your role is always to communicate, push, influence and sometimes let go. You are absolutely accountable to your investors. Your choice is their fortune or their loss. Writing is unexplainable, magical, at times scary, and totally addictive. You live to the full, several lives at a time. You give yourself the right to create another reality, laced with imagination and fantasy. You know, I think everyone has several dimensions, known or unknown, shown or hidden, and being a writer allows me to embrace as many of them as I want or possibly can. This is also why being published has always been an important driver in my writing. I often say you write to be read, you write to be published. Why? Because you established a privilege relationship between you and others. You write to them, maybe to seduce, clearly to give, and always to teach. I think this is it – writing is about transmission and legacy. Writing, in a twisted way, is about courage. For me, and even more in today’s world, writing is the ultimate sign of intellectual freedom.
After speaking to me, François stood, smiled and quietly left the cosy bar where we had met. While watching his elegant figure fade away into the remains of the day, I could not help thinking what a beautiful lesson in life I had just witnessed. The drive to be more should be inspiring for all of us. The empathy and the generosity towards fellow human beings should make us think how to sprinkle a bit of it in our lives as managers, leaders, bankers or just people. Maybe it could have shed a different light on financial services back in the day. The unwavering belief of the importance and power of ideas to trigger change and actions should inspire us to dare – dare to be yourself, to have a voice, and to show it. François is a man after my own heart.