Wasserstein: Remembering an Unlikely Heroic Leader

I’m more sad than I should be that Bruce Wasserstein died yesterday. A 61-year-old legend — or relic, take your pick — of the go-go 1980s. Bid ’em up Bruce, whose every strategic move and thought was chronicled and often heralded by the popular business press. He had more than his share of time in the sun.

But somehow, Bruce’s death signals the end of a something we may never see again. A time when dealmakers were masters of the universe. When one man could be considered so powerful and important that deals and markets moved on his say so. It was terribly exciting. Though Bruce Wasserstein was anything but charismatic in person, he was, improbably enough, a heroic leader.

For about a month, Bruce Wasserstein was my boss, back in the 1990s. The publishing company for which I was an editor and publisher, had been on the auction block and our fate looked grim. We were likely to be split into chunks, sold in part to an unexciting conference group company. Those of us who believed we had built something very special were crestfallen to think of ourselves as part of a yard sale.

But at the 11th hour — quite literally — Bruce Wasserstein swooped in as a white knight to buy the whole company. Not only would our various entities around the country stay intact, but there was something thrilling about being seen as so valuable that Wasserstein threw a preemptive bid on the table at the last minute.

When Bruce won the bid, he celebrated with a few of us who were leaders of the company, by taking us to his regular lunch haunt: 21 Club in New York. I had already made plans to leave the company to take another job outside New York, but somehow having the opportunity to have lunch with Wasserstein at the famous lunch spot of titans, was the perfect capping detail of my New York experience. It was, as I recall, a terribly ordinary lunch. Wasserstein had his usual table (center of everything) and the wait staff knew what he always liked. He made small talk with us — and nodded around the room to the array of powerful characters who were also regulars. I was particularly thrilled that a group of lawyers I knew from working in London happened to be there — and made a point of coming to me to say hello. I, too, had “people.” And clearly, I thought with pride, Wasserstein could see that.

It was the first — and only — time I talked to Bruce Wasserstein. My conclusion then was that he expressed himself better in actions than words. Indeed, when we interviewed him at his Rockefeller Plaza offices for our January 2008 article, he proved masterful at pregnant elisions (“The deal was what it was,” he offered at one point). But over the course of many hours of conversation, a picture emerged of a brilliant and creative dealmaker who cared deeply about creating value of all types — economic, organizational, and personal — and who seemed driven as much by a desire for elegant solutions as to close the deal. In the interview, Wasserstein revealed his idiosyncratic approach to the challenge of creating value — as a manager, a dealmaker, and as an adviser to CEOs. HBR tried to distill some of his best thinking in an interview we published last year.

As I reread the HBR article yesterday, I was reminded of what he’d accomplished, what he’d seen, and who’d he’d influenced in his decades — and it amounted to so much more than merely symbolize a bygone era.