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Hello, Friends! Eight years ago I read a piece of company news on my way into the workday, and I've never quite put it down. I've had a long time to wonder why something like that stays. We start here.
I worked at Bank of America then, and the company intranet had a section called In the News. I read it every morning. It sat near the top of the page once I logged in, above anything I was actually accountable for, and I'd gotten into the habit of going through it early, before the day had any claims on me. Most mornings it was earnings coverage, or an analyst saying something about deposits, or a photograph of a building somewhere with a ribbon in front of it.
April of 2018. Two months after the shooting at the high school in Parkland, Florida, the bank said publicly that it would stop financing manufacturers of military-style firearms sold to civilians. The statement came from one of our vice chairs. It named companies we did business with, some of which I recognized, and said we were going to stop.
I read it twice.
I'd been there four years by then. Long enough to have stopped auditioning, not long enough to take the place for granted. I had come from another bank, and there is a particular attention you pay to an institution in the years just after you've chosen it. You are checking, without meaning to, whether the choice was sound.
So what I felt reading that page wasn't surprise. It was nearer to confirmation. Brian Moynihan had been running the company since 2010. By then I'd built a picture of him and the people around him out of much smaller material than a public announcement: where the money went, and how the language sounded on the mornings when something had gone wrong. It looked like the company I already believed I worked for. What was new was the price.
The statement had come from a vice chair. I never once thought of it as hers. In my memory of that morning it is Brian's decision, and I suspect that's how most of us filed it, because it's what employees do with anything arriving from that height. We attach it to whoever we've decided the company is. By then I worked at the corporate headquarters and had met him more than once, briefly, the way you do. It didn't put me any closer to knowing whether the choice was his. I gave him credit that morning for something I couldn't have confirmed, and he had no idea I'd given it.
What that decision told me had little to do with firearms. It had to do with the kind of call it was. Someone at the top of the company had looked at a choice that was going to anger a portion of our clients and a portion of our own people, and made it anyway, on the grounds that it was the right thing to do. That is a particular piece of information about the people running a place, and information like that does not stay attached to the decision that produced it. It becomes a general expectation. If they will do this when the subject is firearms, they will do it when the subject is someone like me.
I want to be exact about what I felt, because pride is the easy word for it. I have spent a career paying attention to what institutions say about people like me when there's no advantage in saying it. That morning the building had said something true, and it was going to cost it something to have said it. What I felt was an affirmation of my choice to be there.
Underneath the article was a comment section, which the company kept open.
Most of what was there was some version of what I was feeling. Thirty or forty comments, the bulk of them proud, several saying so at length. People named the decision as a reason they worked there.
Four or five went the other way. We were woke. We were caving to the left. I don't remember the wording exactly, and I remember the sense of it, which was that the bank had picked a side.
Our practice was to leave comments like that up. They came down when they crossed into open disrespect of a person, and short of that they stayed, which I thought then and think now was right.
I scrolled past them. I never went back to look, and I'd have told you at the time that they hadn't affected me much, which was true.
What I've thought about since is that those four or five people were reading the same paragraph I was. They logged into the same page that morning, on their way into the same workday, and what they found there told them something about whether this was a place for them. It told me something too. The two things were not the same.
Two hundred thousand people worked there in 2018. The decision landed on all of them at once and it did not mean the same thing twice. It gave me a place. It told four or five people the company had lost its nerve. Most people read it and went to a meeting.
Eight years on, I've had to allow that the decision may not have been what I took it for. It came weeks after Parkland, when every large company was being asked to say something. What looked like conviction from my desk may have been a group of people working out what the bank now had to do. I don't know, and I never will.
It made no difference. I read the page that morning and felt I belonged there, and the feeling outlasted the decision by years. It had stopped being about firearms almost immediately. What it left behind was a working assumption about what the people running the company would do when something mattered.
Brian and the people around him made that call knowing what was coming, and then they went and handled it. The client conversations, the pushback, whatever it cost them. That was the part they could see.
I could have told him the rest. The comment box was open, and plenty of people used it that morning to say they were proud. What none of us put in it was the actual thing: that a decision about firearms had settled a question about belonging, and that some of us would go on drawing on it for years. I don't think it occurred to me that this was information he didn't have. I told it at home that night. I've told it since, and I'm telling it now, eight years on. It has never once gone to him.
"The story your people tell when you're not in the room is your truest legacy." — MB
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