Waging War for Mindshare

The Newport Doctrine

My father, a man who spent almost thirty years in the Navy and the rest of his life teaching its future admirals, had a thing for maps. Not the kind you fold up and stuff in a glove compartment, but vast, intricate charts of battles long past. He’d stand before them in his study, a retired Commander in a tweed jacket tracing the ghostly movements of fleets and armies with a wooden pointer.

"Strategy," he’d say, the word carrying the weight of sunken ships and fallen empires, "is the art of the general. But victory? Victory is the business of the quartermaster."

For fifteen years, I worked on Wall Street, a world away from the salt air and historical gravitas of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island where he taught. My battles were fought in spreadsheets and boardrooms, my weapons were leverage and arbitrage. I was an investment banker, which is a polite way of saying I was a professional gambler in a nicer suit. We spoke of "killing it" on a deal and "capturing" market share, …