Brian Moynihan
Chairman and CEO, Bank of America
Ideas are easy. Getting them implemented is hard, and getting the buy-in from the people who actually have to make the change is hard. So you have to start every decision from what it’s going to be at that last node, so to speak, as opposed to what it’s going be at the center.
Summary
This week on “Leadership Matters,” Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan joins Alan for a candid conversation about his background, his remarkable career, and some of the leadership principles that have guided his stewardship of one of the country’s largest and most impactful financial institutions.
From his leadership at the helm of Merrill Lynch during the financial crisis to his work to drive community impact at BofA, Brian has a remarkable track record of not shying away from significant challenges. As one of the most admired executives in America — Brian was award CEO Magazine’s CEO of the Year award in 2020 — he is frequently consulted by leaders across industries and verticals who are facing their own knotty issues. In his discussion with Alan, Brian recommends embracing the ‘genius of the and’; rather than viewing competing stakeholder interests as zero-sum, effective leaders should seek solutions that empower multiple parties to achieve their goals. From the importance of lifelong curiosity to the ways his leadership style has changed over time, Brian offers a wealth of advice that leaders from all walks of life will find valuable.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Guest Bio
Brian Moynihan leads a team of approximately 215,000 employees dedicated to making financial lives better for people, companies of every size, and institutional investors across the United States and around the world.
Bank of America was named World’s Best Bank by Euromoney magazine in 2022, as well as America’s Most JUST Company by JUST Capital. The company has been recognized as a leader in financial services, including on Forbes magazine’s list for World’s Best Employers and World’s Top Female- Friendly Companies as well as Fortune magazine’s list of World’s Most Admired Companies and Best Companies to Work For. Bank of America also was named on People’s Companies that Care list and is the top global bank on Fortune’s Change the World list. The company has been ranked four times on LinkedIn’s Top 50 Companies in the U.S. list, and also is recognized annually as a top employer by Working Mother, LATINA Style, Black Enterprise, Military Times and U.S Veterans Magazine.
Moynihan participates in several organizations that focus on economic and market trends, including the World Economic Forum’s International Business Council Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics Initiative (chair), the Financial Services Forum, the Bank Policy Institute, the Business Roundtable, The Clearing House Association (chair), the American Heart Association CEO Roundtable (co-chair) and the Business Council. He also is a co-chair of the Steering Committee of the Council for Inclusive Capitalism and chair of the Sustainable Markets Initiative, which was founded by His Majesty King Charles III in his former role of His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales.
Moynihan serves as chair of the company’s Global Diversity and Inclusion Council and is a member of the advisory council for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He is also a member of the Brown University Corporation's Board of Fellows and the Watson Institute Board of Governors (chair), the Catalyst Board of Directors, the Council on Competitiveness Board (chair) and the Appeal of Conscience Board of Trustees.
Moynihan works with public officials, businesses and civic leaders at the local level through his participation on the Charlotte Executive Leadership Council, the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership (chair) and the Partnership for Rhode Island.
Episode Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
I’m joined today by a seasoned executive and brilliant leader in banking and finance — and frankly, across business — who has spent over a decade helping a critically important financial institution navigate complex challenges and leverage innovative opportunities.
Brian Moynihan is the CEO and Chairman of Bank of America, one of the world’s largest banks with more than 68 million consumer and small business clients and operations in more than 35 countries. Since taking the helm at Bank of America in 2010, Brian has focused on transforming the bank into a more sustainable and more efficient institution that delivers growth and value for all of its clients, stakeholders, and shareholders. Under his leadership, Bank of America has emerged stronger and better positioned to serve the needs of its clients worldwide.
Also recognized as a global thought leader, Brian serves as the chair of the World Economic Forum’s International Business Council Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics Initiative and chair of the Sustainable Markets Initiative. CEOs across industries and geographies regularly look to Brian for his thoughtful advice on finance, leadership, social responsibility, and ESG. I am thrilled to welcome Brian onto the show today to share his insights on leadership, the financial market, and the role of the private sector in building a better future for us all.
Brian, welcome to “Leadership Matters.” It is a pleasure to have you want to be part of this.
Brian Moynihan
Alan, it’s great to be on the show with you, and congratulations on your success on the show.
Alan Fleischmann
Thank you so much.
Firstly, I’d love to start with a little description of your early life and your upbringing in Ohio. You were the sixth of eight children, if I’m not mistaken — a big family, actually. What was it like around the house growing up?
Brian Moynihan
Oh, we had eight children for sure, it was always interesting. I was sort of the middle of the pack even though I was number six, just because of the tightness of the of the birth order. You always had a group of people to play with, to challenge you, to make sure you stayed in line, to argue about doing the dishes. It was a lot of fun, but you learn from each other. They’re all talented, bright people that do different things in life, but you also learned how to get along with a lot of people, just because you sort of had to on a day-to-day basis.
Alan Fleischmann
To thrive you had to survive, and to survive, I guess, you had thrive.
Brian Moynihan
Exactly. I was lucky to have parents that valued education, so they made sure we all did well in school and got to college and beyond, for most of us. They spent all of their money making that happen, frankly, and we owe them a debt for that. They basically had to put almost everything they earned into college education for all of us. So it was a different day, but they did a great job doing it.
Alan Fleischmann
Tell us a little about your parents, what did they do?
Brian Moynihan
Well, my dad was a chemist. He was a research chemist at DuPont for his whole career and held a whole bunch of patents with DuPont on a bunch of plastic products, including the one to hold your windshield together in a car wreck. He sort of got into that early on.
My mom got married 18, had eight kids, and then went back to work full-time as an insurance agent, and then running a district office for an insurance company, which I always thought was a great mix. They’ve both passed away now, but they were sort of a great mix, my mother being a very high-energy, aggressive person and my dad being a classic researcher — thoughtful, probative. He would frustrate you when you asked him to help you do your math or chemistry homework, because he wouldn’t ever give you the answer. He taught enough to know put you through the through the wringer. Both of them were always supportive of us and very helpful to us becoming successful.
Alan Fleischmann
Was the family dinner table a place where everybody came together?
Brian Moynihan
It was. In the days gone by, there were not a lot of distractions, so you basically got home from school after you did your sports or whatever activities you did and we sat down for dinner. Whenever I get dinner with a group of clients, it reminds me of how many people we had our dinner table every night, which was a bit of work.
So generally, we had dinner every night. Those days are tougher to hold on to now. But that was, I think, a part of how we learned to get along, react to everybody, learn about other people’s knowledge, and be curious.
Alan Fleischmann
Did everybody do different things in the family, the siblings?
Brian Moynihan
We have some teachers, some computer scientists, some biologists, and then a black sheep, me, that was a lawyer, and then a missionary. So it was an interesting mix, but largely, they were more oriented to science than I ended up being. I probably went a different way because I wanted to be different.
Alan Fleischmann
Anything stand out when you look back to your high school years that became very formative for you?
Brian Moynihan
Well, I’m a big believer in participatory activities with lots of different people, just to learn about people. I grew up in small-town Ohio. It was an old town, but a small town, and benefited with the resurgence of U.S. manufacturing in the ’50s and ’60s, for plastics and things like that. So it was a good mix of insiders and outsiders — my parents actually came from upstate New York. So we’re going to same high school, playing sports on one team, or whatever else you chose.
I’m just a big believer in that formative process of learning from all different kinds of people with all different sorts of backgrounds, that it always helped you learn a little bit what the rest of life was — which is, you’re gonna be surrounded by people who aren’t you, so how do you get along and motivate? It was stuff you learned at an early day.
So it was a it was a good place to grow up. Different than growing up where my kids grew up, in the suburbs of Boston, but it was interesting nonetheless. It was small, and so the opportunities weren’t there. So all of us have moved out, basically. That has to do with the fact that there’s just not that many jobs available for the kinds of things my siblings got into.
Alan Fleischmann
what time was it in Ohio?
Brian Moynihan
Marietta. It’s a historical town, settled in the late 1700s by, really, the first western movement of America, it was outlined by George Washington.
Actually, David McCullough just wrote a book called The Pioneers, and it came from some research he did once he was given a graduation speech at Ohio University — which is in Athens, which is a bit away. Then he ended up writing a book about Marietta and the founding of Marietta, which is a fascinating story. That whole area of Ohio was either settled by a few private companies, but mostly through land given to Revolutionary War generals, as they didn’t have any money to pay them. So for the first rafts going down to the Northwest Territory, Marietta was the first ford. So it had a very old, historical aspect to it for a relatively new part of the country. It was kind of fascinating that way.
I was a history major and wrote my thesis on it, so that’s why I happened to enjoy David’s book a lot.
Alan Fleischmann
I’m going to read the book now, that’s amazing.
Did you ever think you were going to Ohio State University? I always think that, whenever I find anybody from Ohio, even if they didn’t go there — in your case, you didn’t go there either — there’s such an allegiance to OSU I’m always stunned by.
Brian Moynihan
At the risk of alienating all my friends from high school in Ohio, my grandfather went to Notre Dame University and my one uncle — I’ve one uncle and I have seven siblings, which is kind of an interesting difference in family dynamics — he went to Notre Dame also. So I grew up thinking I would go to Notre Dame as an undergraduate, because I played football and I had the view that I might be able to play football there, although I was never going to be good enough, or big enough, or fast enough.
So I grew up rooting for Notre Dame and was kind of anti-Ohio State growing up. My brother went there and it’s a wonderful place, the football games are beyond belief. Ohio-Michigan in the late ’70s, with Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler, was just really something else. But when it came to it, I ended up going to Brown, because I applied there, got in, and then left and went there. My older brother had gone to Brown and it was the best school I’d gotten into. I’d never seen Brown, never seen Providence, never seen anything. I just got in and said I had to go, because it was the best school I got into.
Alan Fleischmann
It’s a great school. I imagine that was a big deal, getting up and moving there. The fact that your brother went there first probably made it a little easier, but the fact that you chose to go east rather than stay in the area was probably a big deal.
Brian Moynihan
It was. I mean, you never think of it as a big deal — I was 17 when I left Marietta, so nothing was a big deal, anything was possible, naively. But it probably was a bigger deal. But I went to Brown and immediately played football, and rugby, and did other things. Got to know the people in the dorms, college kids are more similar than not. It was it was a lot of fun, and it was a great school. I learned a lot, probably got challenged a lot earlier on, and probably was not as prepared as I might have suggested when I walked in.
The great Gordon Wood was a history professor my freshman year taking history, and I remember getting blown away by him. He was one of the greatest Revolutionary War era historians America has ever had. Trying to keep up with him was a little interesting, but it was it was a great choice and it opened a lot of possibilities, including meeting my wife there, that probably made me what I am today.
Alan Fleischmann
I know Brown has their own kind of pass/fail system, they want you to be liberal-arts focused in many ways. But did you think you might be a research chemist, like your dad?
Brian Moynihan
No. In fact, one of the things that attracted me to Brown was, being impatient in terms of getting on with life, I could avoid having the distribution requirements and everything. So basically, I took calculus in high school and never took math again and I never took science again. Which is a little bit dangerous, except I was lucky in that my high school was very strong those programs, I even took some at the local college. So I was kind of through a lot of learning there, where you get beyond a certain level and you’ve really got to practice it to bother to do it. But it allowed me to move faster.
Brown was unique in that way. You could just drop into stuff and take it, it allowed you to accelerate. I think that was consistent with my sort of general impatience, trying to get going and get beyond where I was. Whether I was prepared for it or not, I think, was a separate question. But I tried.
Alan Fleischmann
It sounds like you liked Brown a lot. And you met your wife there, so it must have been a great experience. And you were a history major there?
Brian Moynihan
Yeah, I was a history major. But it’s just a unique platform. The idea of the open curriculum, which was founded by students — including Ira Magaziner, believe it or not, who we know different ways. The idea that students could change a curriculum for a 300-year-old institution was kind of a wacky idea, but they did. When they were going to school full-time, they completely changed the curriculum by the time they graduated university.
So 50 years into that experiment, it really is unique that way. I’ve been on the board for years, and my kids have gone there. I had two brothers that ended up going there, their spouses went there, my wife went there, our kids went there. So it’s been a good family tradition, although it was not a tradition at all. None of us even thought about it, or probably could have named it when we were sophomores in high school, I’ll put it that way. But it has become a great family tradition.
Alan Fleischmann
That had to be an amazing thing to experience, for Ira and team to actually, while they were students, transform a curriculum. I’d never heard of such a thing, it’s amazing.
Brian Moynihan
You go back and read about it, you can’t believe it was almost allowed to happen in the context. But it did happen, it was allowed to happen. Then the idea of it being durable across 50 plus years is pretty amazing, too. That somehow, some group of people didn’t come along with a better idea. Today, it really still defines the Brown experience to some degree, this ability to explore without distribution requirements, the things that can confine exploration.
Now believe me, if you’re in computer science and you’re at Brown, you have a very rigorous computer science curriculum, don’t make any doubts about that. Even history, from what I did, has like 22 more classes, they’ve changed the majors over time. But the idea that you can take sort of whatever you want, it was pretty fascinating.
Alan Fleischmann
With everyone talking about how we’re going to transform higher education, it sounds like Brown may be one of the first ones that actually did it, but 50 years ago. How you actually can cradle curiosity and give people a well-rounded life.
Brian Moynihan
That’s really the point. How do you cradle curiosity, as you say it, or enhance curiosity, or give curiosity as a lifelong vocation for people. Because at the end of the day, I believe and often tell the team that the day you leave college — when you have all that information coming at you in formal education, in college, graduate school, whatever it is — is the day you start getting less smart unless you’re curious. Because what happens is, the rest of the life channels you into narrower and narrower things.
So to me, the best attribute of people who are going to be successful longer term is people who can maintain their curiosity level. I’d even suggest a book called A Curious Mind by Brian Grazer, which is a small book about his career, which is fascinating. It’s a lot of fun to listen to and also to read. It’s all about how you keep asking questions and learning, because in the end of the day, that’s the piece that goes away if you don’t nurture it and push it. That’s a suggestion I give everybody, so Brown was a great basis for that.
Alan Fleischmann
Which is why, probably, you then encouraged your kids, and nephews, and nieces, and friends’ kids to go, and why you’re on the board. It sounds amazing, actually.
Then you decided to go to law school, and you actually went to Notre Dame then.
Brian Moynihan
Yeah, I grew up thinking I was gonna be a lawyer, because my grandfather was a lawyer. It’s a little hard to believe, but I grew up in a time when F. Lee Bailey had these wonderful, complex trials and Perry Mason was on TV. Trial lawyers were huge, the idea that you could win these criminal trials for defendants. So I grew up thinking that’s what I wanted to do.
My grandfather was a judge, so I kind of went in that direction. Then it kind of came together because he’s the one who went to Notre Dame. I did a different law school, but then went to Notre Dame law school. I went in thinking I’d be a criminal lawyer or labor lawyer and came out practicing corporate law, because it was the best opportunity for me to get back to the East Coast and practice. Their name was great, and law school is great in terms of teaching how to think in a way that is pretty powerful.
I wouldn’t it recommend to people aren’t going to practice law. It’s a good backdrop for a lot of professions beyond the practice of law, but I wouldn’t spend three years doing it unless you really were going to practice.
Alan Fleischmann
And you went from there back to Rhode Island, right? What drew you to go back? I guess the Brown experience made you feel at home there. Then you went to the largest firm that dealt with corporate issues.
Brian Moynihan
Yeah. So I went back to Rhode Island because honestly, I wanted to go work in Boston, but no Boston firm would hire somebody from Notre Dame. It was closed off to the Boston law schools and stuff — which I don’t let them forget now at this stage of my career. For my friends that work at those law firms that went to Brown, I’ve got a couple of friends there at some major firms, and I’m always teasing that they turned me down.
But anyway, Edwards & Angell was the name of the firm. It was the old firm, and even they had to break the glass a little bit to let me in, as a kid that was not from one of the top Eastern law schools. The people that were great to me. I had a great mentor there, a fellow by the name of Duncan Johnson, who took me under his wing and let me practice behind him.
I learned a lot, and I happened to hit a time when corporate law took off in the ’80s. If you think about some of the apocryphal stories, it was a lot emergent M&A activity, there was a lot of banking. Interstate banking came down. So it was just it was a wild time to be in corporate work, because stuff was flying in the mid ’80s with the leveraged buyouts. All this stuff came out after not a lot of activity in the ’70s and all of a sudden, everything exploded. So it was a it was a good time to be a corporate lawyer, Edwards & Angell was a great firm, and I had a couple good mentors, including Duncan. It was just pretty fantastic and so allowed me to be a partner at a pretty young age.
Alan Fleischmann
So you got exposed to the things you ended up doing later in life — banking, finance, and obviously, business leadership as well.
The role of mentors must have been a big deal your whole career, but that sounds like he was actually a standout.
Brian Moynihan
Yeah, he was one of those people who I always say pushed you out on the tightrope, but always had the net underneath you, though you may not have realized that the net was there. We also had a fellow named Bill Mutterperl who was doing a lot of work for Fleet, where Bill was general counsel and Terry Murray ran it.
You just learned from everybody. If you listened to them, you learned a lot about financial statements, accounting principles, and banking. I did other financial services companies, but they’re not making cars or they’re not making TV. It’s about numbers, math, ratios, and things. So it’s kind of fun.
Alan Fleischmann
And Fleet Financial, they were a client of yours, right? You worked with them, so you got to get to know them and they’d get to know you. How many years were you at the firm when you decided to come over and be their deputy general counsel?
Brian Moynihan
Yeah. So they came to me deep in 1992 and said, “Do you want to join the company?” Originally, the idea was that I would come on as general counsel, with the idea that I wouldn’t last long and that I’d moved to business. Because the statement that Terry Murray made, which was the general counsel told me —w hich I was never quite sure what Bill Mutterperl thought of — was, “He’s too smart to be a lawyer. Get him in here and we’ll have him do something real.” I thought the general counsel had to have his ego in check to be able to kind of work with that statement and bring me in.
So I was deputy general counsel from April to July, something like that. Then I went and worked on this thing called Fleet Focus and ended up running it. Out of that, in ’04, I became the head of M&A strategy.
So it was 30 years ago in April that I joined Fleet, which was then merging into Bank of America at the time, and 29 years since I moved out of the law and into the business side.
Alan Fleischmann
Was that a big transition, or because you had been exposed so much to the transactional work and been at the table with the other folks, was it a natural to kind of be at the other side of the table?
Brian Moynihan
You know, it wasn’t a big transition in the sense that I was flipping what I did, but I had to get out of what I did. What I mean by that is, I went from being the lawyer with a principal group on the M&A transactions and the work they were doing to, I was the person who was supposed to be leading the effort to do it. I was lucky to have some great teammates working with me, a guy named Terry Laughlin who was a new M&A well.
So I went in and had a bunch of MBAs and college kids, all very high-powered, moving. I could corral them, but I had to give up the practice of law, because the day you’ve left doing it every day, you started becoming less and less current. And, it wasn’t my job. So there was a discipline, there was difficulty, but the subject matter was similar. If you’re buying a bank, doing the models and assessing and all that stuff that we had to do was different. Then we had to do the merger integration. So I actually had to lead the integration. A lot of that process learning we got from Fleet Focus, from those merger years.
All that work are the types of things that I carried with me and we did later at Bank of America called New BAC, where we started really working the company’s processes again. But it came from those early days of trying to take a bunch of companies that were thrown together and restructured and getting them to operate as one, which we went after in 1993 and before.
Alan Fleischmann
And you took over the brokerage and the wealth management division early on as well, right?
Brian Moynihan
I picked that up. So I was running M&A and strategies, principally for the company, and we had a lot of very smart teammates that were doing a lot of great work and pushing change for the company. We got to where Fleet and Bank Boston came together as a group called Fleet Boston. Then Chad Gifford, who also became a mentor after Terry, stepped in and said, “We’ve got to put this person in the business, because they’ve gotta learn how to run something more than this strategic function.” They asked me to take over brokerage and wealth management, I think it was in ’99. So I kept doing that.
I did that at Fleet Boston, and then when Bank of America bought fleet Boston, I kept doing it at the combined company — all the way through to where it gets kind of interesting with that Merrill transaction, but that’s a story in and of itself. But I did that basically on and off for nine years.
Alan Fleischmann
Then Bank of America became home?
Brian Moynihan
So 2003 fall, we signed the transaction and early April 2004, it closed. So Bank of America now Fleet Boston and becomes the first truly interstate bank, with branches from California to New England to Florida to Texas. Still had a hole in the Midwest by happenstance, which we have been filling in. So that’s when I came into the company 2003–04.
Alan Fleischmann
Were you already married at this point? Your wife and you met at Brown; how soon did you start a family?
Brian Moynihan
So my first child was born in 1991 and the second ’93, which were interesting times, because ’91 was when the Bank of New England transaction happened. When people think about bank failures, that was a huge bank failure in the Northeast and a big, very contested thing. So that was going on. My son was born in July, and the transaction kind of got done over Easter weekend and a little bit later.
Then ’93 was when I changed careers, when my daughter was born. I remember wearing a pager because we were heading, off doing this project in a place that was a part of the facilities. Nobody could find you, so I had to wear a pager. She was born in ’93, then the last one was born in ’97.
So at that point for the last two I was in business, as opposed to law. For the first one I was in law, he used to come to law offices with me and stuff, so it was kind of fun.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s cool. It’s really fun, actually, to hear you talk about these epic moments that I watched closely. I worked at Chase at that same period and this evolution was fascinating, in how you made Boston the headquarters for so many things as well.
Brian Moynihan
I mean, my job stayed in Boston because my unit was headquartered in Boston, which is a little different, until I took over other business at Bank of America and all kinds of things. So I’ve stayed in Boston largely because the family stayed there, while I was traveling all the time and doing what I needed to do to work at the company.
A big part of the negotiation deal was to put the wealth management business in Boston and we built it up. Because frankly, between the two companies, it was bigger at old Fleet Boston than it was at Bank of America. That’s why it was so easy to locate there, whereas the consumer bank and things like that were dominated by Bank of America.
Alan Fleischmann
And were was Bank of Boston at that point?
Brian Moynihan
It was part of Fleet Boston, it had merged. Terry and Chad put the companies together, then Chad took over as CEO before the company was sold in ’03.
Alan Fleischmann
It was huge in Latin America, I remember. In the wealth management world, it was considered among the most important banks throughout Latin America.
Brian Moynihan
It was. That was a fascinating story that you can learn from Henrique Meirelles, who would later become the Central Bank head of Brazil, a senator in Brazil, and so on. They built that literally from branch one, from scratch. It was institutional banking inside to build a retail presence, and it was a fascinating model. I went down to visit the team there a bunch of times, but they literally built it from one to x. We probably sold them at 300.
But it was a very tailored business. It was a great little business they built on top of the corporate business, which made it kind of fun. We sold that business when Bank of America and Fleet Boston came together in 2004 or ’05, if I remember right. The retail part, we still have the institutional part.
Alan Fleischmann
I remember, there was a beautiful Bank of Boston operation in Buenos Aires, in Argentina. It was beloved, it was one of the prettiest buildings downtown.
Brian Moynihan
Yeah, it was pretty building. We still have the institutional part, as I said, but we had a nice headquarters there, we had a thing called the White House in Sao Paulo, because it looked like a replica of the White House. It was a brand major branch and stuff, it was kind of built that way.
It just got to be hard to manage in the context. It either had to get a lot bigger, which would put pressure on the company on balance, or it had to be kept and kept. And the idea was, that’s not a way to have a bank, so we sold it.
Alan Fleischmann
And then I guess, just a few years later, you acquired Merrill Lynch. That was during the financial crisis.
When I think of that period, I think of you right in the center of all that, being right there. But part of that was because you were named CEO of Merrill Lynch during that period as well, right?
Brian Moynihan
Yeah. So this is where it gets a little crazy. Around 2007 or so, I was asked to go do the corporate investment bank. Then we started the whole thing around Merrill Lynch, and we ended up signing that deal in in October of 2008, in the middle of the mess. We ended up closing it the first day of ’09.
That’s at the point of time I became general counsel again, partway through December. Largely because we just had to make some changes in the management team, it happened, and I became general counsel. The idea was I probably wouldn’t be general counsel for long, so literally for 40-odd days I was general counsel then went back and took over the businesses — that were, the investment bank, the commercial bank, and the wealth businesses after the deal. Then for ’09 I ran those businesses for a while. Then we flipped them around and I took over the consumer business in the middle of August of ’09. Then by the end of ’09, I was announced as CEO.
I wouldn’t suggest that job pattern for anybody, to have that many different jobs.
I was actually out of a job in the early part of December. I was doing the merger integration and stuff and I said, “We’ve got to eliminate some jobs, including ones at the top of the house.” One of them was the job I had. I said, “That’s the discipline we have to have.” So I was cut. We read it, announced it, and then they shifted around and made me general counsel to sort of keep me around. Ken Lewis and the board made that decision, and then the rest is history.
It’s hard to describe what it was like to go through that period of time, with the amount of pressure on the outside of us and how fast things came down. I think we signed Merrill in say, mid-October and by it was closed by January 1. Now we’re talking about a year to do a bank merger, and we did one and 75 days or whatever it was. These things can happen a lot faster if we put our minds to it, meaning that everybody does.
Alan Fleischmann
How long were you the CEO Merrill Lynch?
Brian Moynihan
Well, at Merrill I had the brokerage. Tom Montag had the trading side, and that was basically most of ’09, most of the fall, until Labor Day or something like that. So it wasn’t a long term stint. It was the wealth manager part of it, the commercial banking part of it, and investment banking part. So we had a different organization configuration then.
Alan Fleischmann
Then when did you transition into your next role?
Brian Moynihan
Well, I became CEO on January 1, 2010. The actual day I took over. It was announced in mid-December and the board made a decision. At that point, Ken said he was leaving at the end of Labor Day, and the board went through a search that went sort of all over the place for a while, but then ended up on me, and I became CEO.
At that time, technically, I started out as running from Labor Day, sometime around then, I was running the consumer bank, because as we restructured management again, the wealth management business went someplace, the commercial business went someplace, and I took over the consumer bank. It was one of those sorts of times when we did it, then Ken decided to leave, and then the whole thing changed again.
Alan Fleischmann
During that period of time, you went though a crisis that was universal. How do you compare that to the struggles of regional banks today, like First Republic, Silicon Valley Bank, and others?
Brian Moynihan
You know, the major difference between what went on, with a certain defined business models today in Merrill to AIG and all stuff is, none of what happened in the fall of ’08 was inside the banking system. Everyone thinks it was the bank; it was really outside the banking system, the pressure put on from Lehman, from Bear Stearns, from AIG, from some of the foreign banks, you pick it. In the U.S. it was largely outside the banking system, issues of capital and regulation. The banking system was receiving all of that, and it shook some of us up pretty badly, but that came into us.
So that was different. The recent crisis now is really unique business models, which are not similar to regional banks, honestly, that have had trouble because of the way the customer system worked at some of those companies you mentioned. The system now is capitalized. Liquidity is strong, the earnings power is strong, management is strong. There’s a period massive rate moves, but that not an asset quality question, which was the late ’80s and early ’90s, where I cut my teeth on a lot of failed bank deals. It’s not an ecommerce, dotcom thing, which was the ’99–2000 era, or even the fallen angels in early 2000.
What’s going on now is more of an interest rate-driven issue that, largely, is gonna wash through the system. It’s not asset quality and things which are long-term issues. Now, if there’s a recession, there’s a great debate about what happens next. But right now, the asset quality industry is very strong.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s great.
I’m gonna come back to things like mentors and the big influences in your life, but let’s talk a little bit about Bank of America’s philanthropy and its charitable group a little bit, because that’s a huge part of your identity. Not only are you able to navigate, obviously, an extraordinary institution like Bank of America from a leadership point of view and strengthen it, but the values proposition — not just the value proposition — has been a huge part of your leadership.
People think about it. People think about Bank of America in the community. People think about Bank of America as a financial partner to build community. I’m curious how important that was from day one. And certainly, when people think of Brian Moynihan as a leader, they think of that.
Brian Moynihan
So a couple of things. One of the things that you learn to respect about this company is that the oldest parts of our company go back to 1784. Even though this is my 14th year, I’m like a whisper of time across the history of this company. So what you’re trying to do is make sure you improve it and leave more wood on the woodpile, so to speak, and drive it. So that’s one thing. We all have to be humble about the fact that it takes 200,000-some people, 60 million customers, and tens of thousands of commercial customers to make this all work.
The second thing is, it’s got to sustain. Sustain not in a technical context of sustainable energy, but in the context that it’s got to meet all its stakeholders, because it’s intertwined. Its sole job is to actually transmit the economy and capitalism from individuals to companies, to investors. So we believe in that strongly.
The third thing is, we believe in profits and purpose. We got to deliver for our teammates, our customers, our shareholders, and society, because societies have to be strong.
So the genesis of what we do largely comes from the fact that we drive our company to deliver the genius of the AND, profits and purpose — which came from Jim Collins, the great business writer who wrote about that in the mid-’90s. He was basically saying, companies can do both. Not have the tyranny of the OR, one or the other, but the genius of the AND, to thrive, be successful, and have sustainable values and value propositions. That’s how we drive it, and that’s what we do. So we’re producing record earnings and record purpose, so to speak, at the same time.
It’s not just the charity. It’s the way we run the consumer business, which is the biggest and most efficient business in the country by far. It’s the way that we think about where we’ll do business, how we’ll do business, and what industries and countries we’re in. It takes a lot to it. But the real thing comes as basic principles. We’ve got to make money for our shareholders and we’ve got to deliver for the communities, because if we don’t deliver the communities, there won’t be any money to make for our shareholders because communities won’t survive and thrive.
Alan Fleischmann
So it’s the right thing to do, it’s got the right soul and heart. But the value proposition goes with the value proposition, I guess.
Brian Moynihan
It’s got to be done right. In my mind, the only way that we’re going to cure the big things the world wants from us… We have a phrase at Bank of America: “What would you like the power to do?” That’s our catchphrase, for lack of better term, that’s our position. We ask our customers, our clients, our communities, and our shareholders what they’d like the power to do, and then we listen to the answer and try to effectuate the answer.
If you sort of think about that in the grandest sense, the world has told us what they want capitalism to stand for. If we drive that kind of capitalism, you won’t get alternatives thrown at us. But the only way it’ll happen is capitalism, because that has the profit motive. We do $500 million in charity, but we did $450 billion of financing or sustainable financing goals in the last two years. So the $500 million to charities is spectacular, the two million volunteer hours by teammates is spectacular. But for the $450 billion we lent to our clients or investors that generated their activity? That’s what causes the world to make progress. So we try to keep people’s mindsets around both.
Alan Fleischmann
What were the most impactful initiatives have you launched? I know you’ve done a lot, even post-George Floyd you’ve been right there leading. You’ve done a ton on diversity in general. But are there those that are most impactful that you would say are closest to your heart?
Brian Moynihan
We do a lot of financing for first-time homebuyers and we do a lot of work with small businesses, especially women-owned small business and minority-owned small businesses. CDFIs and community-level financing too, which we have $2 billion invested with. We offered to buy 5% of the common equity of all the minority-depository institutions. Thirty-odd of them took our offer, so to speak, and we did that. So that’s all done.
The one that was kind of interesting: As we looked at the situation of risk capital to women, Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native Americans, it was clear that the venture capital industry had not put a lot of money there. So we said, let’s help people do that. We’re not a venture capital or private equity investor, but we said, let’s go out and find funds. We did a two-way win there: we said the funds have to be operated by women, Asian, Hispanic, African Americans, and Native Americans, and they have to invest in companies that are owned by. So we said, let’s try to do that. We thought we’d do some number, I think it was a couple hundred million. We’re now up to $500 million in commitments. It’s 120–30 funds, they’ve invested in a thousand companies in basically two years time.
Why that’s unique is, nobody else did that. Now what we’ve done is created an atmosphere where other people are now investing in those funds, they’re able to raise the first round and now they’re raising round two. Some have raised small rounds and are now raising big rounds.
So the point really is, we can’t do this on our own. We’ve got a lot of people that can go and say, “Bank of America took 10% of our fund.” We put the money in and people say, “Well, the entrepreneurs must know what they’re doing if they’ve invested in this company.” So it’s been kind of neat, because it’s not many people have done it. They’ve done bigger funds, but this is granular stuff. This is not a $100 million investment. Those those kinds of firms that can command a $100 million dollar equity investment have the attention of everybody in the world. It’s the half-million-dollar equity investment that can then buy the trucks — put the equity up to buy the trucks that then we can finance.
So that’s been kind of fun, and I think that’s a signature for our company. One of the signature things when we decided we’re gonna do it, we got twenty investment bankers to do it in their spare time. We didn’t have any infrastructure for this, they just raised their hands and said, “Hey, this is important.” It was a great thing, they supported us, and they went and did it. And now you’re seeing that network of the bankers, the PE firms, and our operating companies coming together, we just had our first conference of them all. It’s just good to see, it’s created an ecostructure that didn’t exist — and by the way, that will be imitated and emulated, all which is good. No one person can do it, but if only 1% of money went to those cohorts from private equity, we had to push that a little bit. And by raising the attention, we may have pushed it a bit.
Alan Fleischmann
You’re listening to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I’m your host, Alan Fleischmann. I’m here with Brian Moynihan — thought leader, leader, and Bank of America CEO — and we’re discussing his journey and how the bank is distinguishing itself.
I’d love to dive in a little more about, if you were to advise other CEOs — and many of our listeners are CEOs or aspiring CEOs — how do they create their own value proposition? What is the best advice you can give those who are seeking to be partners with communities as well?
Brian Moynihan
I think the best advice when thinking about your strategy, values, purpose, and guiding purpose is actually listening to people that you’re here for — which is your teammates, your clients, your customers, your communities. It’s not here for us.
We flipped our statement of who we are from being about wanting to be the best most admired company in the world, which is about us. We flipped that intentionally and said, No, it’s to help clients live their purpose. That just keeps you focused: customer-in, market-in, the things which are important. So as you think about it, you can have values, but the key is to get people to live them.
The second key is to, importantly, make them consistent with the business model so that people don’t see a difference between your values and other things. As I look at it, it’s really the way you operate day to day. As you make decisions, as you decide on products and services. Are you doing it with all the stakeholders out there in mind? Are you doing it in a balanced way? Those stakeholders have to include the community, and the shareholders, and the teammate, and the customer. I think they’re just words unless you can figure out how to incorporate him in the business model.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s great.
As you’re looking at that whole career — you obviously were at a law firm, you ran different parts of the bank, you’re now the CEO of a global enterprise with 200-some-odd thousand employees — has your approach to leadership changed as your responsibilities scaled? I’m sure the answer is probably to a good extent, yes, because each job required something new. But I’m curious what those were.
Brian Moynihan
So, your approach has to change because, you know, we have eight levels in our company of people. Your ability to touch them is different, so your leadership has to be scaled and your consistency has to be a lot more measured at any given moment. If we have 10% turnover in a year, we have 20,000 new people in the company. Your necessarily repeat yourself on things you thought you said. You’re like, “Why am I saying this?” It’s because you have to keep it front and center.
People are busy, they got a lot of things they got to do. So, what we define as responsible growth, the four tenets of it, you know: got to grow, no excuse; got to do it on the right risks; got to do it on the customer focus; got to do it on a scale basis. I have to repeat that. You know, leadership has to repeat that. So, people say we didn’t change, we’re doing the same thing. And new people understand what it is.
So I think those are the best: to be clear, be simple, be straightforward, have the honesty and the courage of convictions. Make it meet the market so it's successful as it meets the other factors. And I think the one message is always learned from outside in.
I once had a teammate when we were sitting in one of these sessions in the mid 2005 or 2006, something like that. She had a very different career because I entered the company at a high level; she entered the company as a teller and worked her way up. She was running a private bank for me. And we had a bunch of smart people who are thinking, “How do we do this and transform the private bank?” We’re all going through all these ideas, and she finally said, “Look, we shouldn’t do anything at this table unless we understand how the person who actually has to do it is going to do it.”
That always stuck with me. Ideas are easy. Getting them implemented is hard, and getting the buy-in from the people who actually have to make the change is hard. So you have to start every decision from what it’s going to be at that last node, so to speak, as opposed to what it’s going be at the center. On paper, it’s all going to look good. And I think that’s a leadership model that we try to espouse at Bank of America and I tried to hold true to and we’ll see if I can keep doing it.
Alan Fleischmann
Are there other leadership principles in general, or are there thought leaders that you’ve followed over the years that inspired you that we could just share with our listeners as well?
Brian Moynihan
Yeah, I think being curious and learning. The world closes you in the room. The walls come in and everything is channeling to specialization. So I may know more about banking regulation than any human being should, but that isn’t going to make me smarter and figure out a problem that one of my teammates brings me. So it’s keeping curious, looking outside and learning from outside, and learning from smart people, learning how things are going to affect us. Asking questions, leading much more with a question than an answer. Because you can command things to happen, but if you want things to happen that are right, you got to let them happen. So, I think those are basic principles.
The other thing is, I think as I’ve looked at it over time, one of the tricks is to keep scaling the way you manage in the company. In our company, I went from 50 people all the way up to now 217,000 people. So you can’t be the same, you need to think about each turn in management differently. And we have a program which tries to discreetly address an individual contributor or manager or individual contributors and management, but to learn how that balance between leadership and management as you go through those scales of support, and to be planned for. You know, there’s always like Ron Sharon. I talked to him early on in my career before I was CEO, and you know, I was sitting there saying, “Okay, how do you use your time? What do you — how do you think about it in?” Those kinds of planful moments, I think, are important to leadership. You’ve got to have the values, got to have a strategy, got to have the products and services, but you also have to have a way that you can impact that organization for what it needs without making it an unopen dialogue and be able to not just listen to the organization and learn from the organization, but guide it. But also, you have to have a way that you can actually have the time to do it. That last part is actually hard, because you’ll be dragged in 1,000 directions on a given day.
Alan Fleischmann
Do you find that people come to you from inside and outside, asking you for those principles? They get to see you in action, so they can learn from you without knowing it.
Brian Moynihan
Yeah, well, informally and formally. But we have a placemat, and we use it all the time. And a placemat is your values, our purpose, of how we run the company and lines of business. I use that all the time. Every quarter I go through and it’s nice to remind people that this is how we run the place. But you know, we’re an open architecture company. My email is in the public domain, and anybody can send me an email in the company. So I get questions all the time from people about, “What books have you read? What about this have you done?” So, you’re always asked about it.
But I always — the issue is that I’m lucky, and have gotten lucky enough, to have the honor of leading this great company. So, what I always try to flip a little bit is, you know, what you need to do is to think about how you’re successful in your job. And that is, you do what the company needs you to do. If they ask you to do something it's probably important; don’t sit there and say, “Well, there’s this other idea I’ve got for a different job,” or something. Don’t turn down opportunities like that. And then work hard, but work in a way that you can show your boss that you’re interested in helping make the company better, not you better. And then you will get promoted and moved on beyond that. And I think the biggest derailer of people is when they start to think about their own career over the company’s outcome.
I use this thing that I was out of a job because it was the right thing to do for the company. And literally, the press release was ready to go out. That could have been the outcome, but it was the best thing for the company. And if you have that attitude, I think everybody has that attitude to the company, then the company would be more successful. So, reminding people of those basics: be curious and never turn down an assignment, because if somebody wants you to do it, it’s probably interesting; do the best, every assignment; constantly learn why we’re doing something, not what you’re doing. Those are adages that I repeat a lot because I get asked about it a lot.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s impressive. The idea of “the company first” creates a “we” culture rather than an “I” culture too. And I know there’s definitely a shift generationally. We all see where people are very much more focused on the “I” and not the “We,” but I imagine that is a culture of the Bank, of BofA. When you go in, you kind of learn to thrive you’re going have to be a “We.” It’s about the institution, it’s about what we do for our stakeholders.
Brian Moynihan
For everybody, we as people have personal beliefs of X, but in this company, they believe the company should stand for Y. And that’s because they know that’s the best thing for the all the employees — the 600,000 family members we have behind it, the customers. And so that takes a certain kind of person, if they’re just saying, you know, “It’s all about me,” the company’s going to eat them up and spit them out, honestly. The culture just doesn’t really tolerate that. And it’s not that we don’t have — everybody has an ego, everybody has a personal motivation. If they weren’t personally motivated, they wouldn’t have been where they are today in our company. But on the other hand, they’ve got to learn how to balance the company’s interests and their interests and also drive the company’s interest because they’ll sweep them behind.
Alan Fleischmann
So, tell us a little about your mentors. And how important are mentors and did that inspire you to create a mentorship-type culture at BofA?
Brian Moynihan
There are two different types of ways that I think about mentorship. One is very discreet people, like Duncan Johnson, Bill Maher, Phil Terry Murray, Ken Lewis, et cetera. But then the second thing is, my colleagues that I’ve worked with over the years: the other CEOs, the major companies, and the senior people. You learn from everybody, so they’re all mentors because you’re pulling stuff from all them. That’s the key, it's being curious and learning so you pick up stuff from people. Is it as formal as, they’re meeting with you every month and saying, “What do you think about that?” No, but you’ve got to learn from all of them.
Now, that being said, we built, especially for the senior people in our company, a pretty deep mentorship program. We’ve got a bunch of former CEOs that work with cohorts of our teammates and the top 100-150 people in the company, who are COs who are wonderful people who have — not directors, not part of our company — and it’s all for employees to ask the kind of questions that they’d want to ask somebody. And we started that two or three years ago, first as a cohort of women, on a theory that we needed women-mentor CEOs to help women think about their careers and stuff. And that was just fabulously received, so then we broadened it out. So, we have a fairly defined program, although there was no roadmap for that program. We literally designed it as we went along and listened to the COs that are doing the mentoring and the cohorts being mentored and the dialogue going on. We just let them morph into it. And then that became a baseline and we moved around the other side, but all of us just expose the people to people. So, we believe in mentorship a lot. It’s always different for different levels of the company. But I think — to me, curiosity and lifelong learning and learning from everybody, there’s something out there, there’s a snippet in everybody. And so you’re grabbing from it. So, and it as you get more senior, it’s hard to have a mentor, because, frankly…
Alan Fleishman
It gets lonely at the top.
Brian Moynihan
It’s not that, you know, the size of the company that our team wants today versus, 15 years ago when we started in its scope and the scale and all this stuff, is just much different than 15 years before that and 15 years before that. So, you know, it’s just hard to find that person who can do what our CFO does — there’s very few of them. And there were only four companies in America that did more than $15 billion the last eight years in a row and we’re one of them. So there’s not a lot of places our CFO can go by and say, “Hey, I’ve got this,” but he should be learning from everybody out there for example. And that’s kind of the thing that goes on.
Alan Fleischmann
Well, it sounds like you also allowed for people to learn almost trust generationally, by kind of breaking down the hierarchy that, “Well, what is this if you didn’t kind of challenge it,” so that people can learn from one another. The way I guess, in the Brown curriculum, the students actually taught the system how to make it better.
Brian Moynihan
Yeah, there’s something to be said. We’ll hire, probably, like this week or so or next week — actually beginning in June in two weeks, we’ll have 2,500 summer interns, 2,600 summer interns come in. And then a month later, we’ll have 2,300 permanent kids and last year we had the same and the year before. That’s just a lot of energy and talent. And so you know, it’s good for us to always listen to who’s coming in because we can teach them experience but they can teach us other things.
And so I just really, really feel strongly that one of the odd, lucky jobs I got my life with all the sort of stuff you do to make some money, was delivering papers. And I always read and stuff like that, so I’d get up in the morning and deliver papers an hour and a half before most people woke up at college. And I did it at the start because one of my teammates on the rugby team said this is the best job in the world; you get paid for peace and you can make a lot more money than you think in an hour’s work. You just have to get up at six o’clock in the morning to do it whenever everyone else is asleep until eight or nine.
So what had happened is I would read the papers while I was walking around. So I’d read, you know, The New York Times, Boston Globe, the Providence Journal, every single day. And it taught me the love of finding stuff that was sort of beyond what you would read, because I had enough time to actually read, you know, almost every article until the end as opposed to flipping the headlines or the news feeds. I always tell people, don’t read the stuff that people are sending to you, because it’s probably what you know. Read the stuff that you wouldn’t get and read it all and find out what’s going on that you don’t know, and that’s the key.
Alan Fleischmann
And this insatiable curiosity, I guess the word comes up a lot when we’re talking about how to keep encouraging that, ask questions. Don’t suggest you need to know all the answers, but actually ask the right questions. And whether you’re reading or like you are, if you’re on a paper route, or whether you’re in a meeting, ask lots of questions.
Brian Moynihan
And I think, even how I’ve come to think about capitalism, and how it has to drive success came from listening to people, you know, in the debates about capitalism and European more-social-capitalism or even non-capitalist things. And listen to people debate and sort of saying, “Wait, wait, wait, people are getting off course here.” They’re taking things they want to do channel capitalism and talking about indictment capitalism. That’s not indictment capitalism, it wouldn’t happen without it. So even that came from Klaus Schwab, and that whole heritage of stakeholder capitalism between some of the people and the people who were against it.
You know, you listen to all of them. But you’re sitting there saying, “Wait a second,” so you’ve learned from all that. So even topics like that, which are more current to my learning set came, not because I studied it but because I’ve learned, and then you start asking questions, and you start learning more about it. So, you know, I didn’t know Jim Collins had said those things until I went back and looked, because I was trying to find out something and I stumbled into the genius. And again, I’ve read his books and he’d done stuff, but I stumbled back into it because I was looking for the question of profits and purpose. And like you said, you know, Jim Collins, had had good and great stuff, he also had this equal ground, you know, and when people are after us saying, you know, “Why is the business community in support of stakeholder capitalism,” it’s like no, this is not new stuff. We’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s just it gets articulated in a way that got people talking about it differently. So, learning about all that is still part of the same.
Alan Fleischmann
You know, on this show we have great leaders like yourself who come on, and we’ve had great conversations. You’ve come up in conversations when other CEOs and leaders, talk about those who are transforming, not just transactional. One of them is Klaus Schwab, you just mentioned him, who’s the executive chairman and founder of the World Economic Forum. And what people don’t really know, it’s not really a bunch of elites hanging out with elites. What it really is is what you said earlier, how do you find your power and harness it in a way to make change, in this case, across public, private and civil society sectors. In our last minute or so, just give us an idea of what you’re doing there. Because when people talk about, you know, making capitalism work, your name comes up. It’s a struggle, but your name comes up knowing that you’re right there kind of pushing forward.
Brian Moynihan
What we’re trying to do is basically simply state that capitalism is going to solve the world’s big problems. And the way to test that it’ making progress is the metrics that we propose. So it’s about people, prosperity, planning, principles, governance. And so, it’s about “Do you pay your taxes,” it’s about human capital rules about minimum wage and, you know, supply chain. So we built this set of metrics with a Big Four accounting firm saying and 200 companies are disclosing. We’re on the third year. So what we can then say to the world is you want us to do X and sustainable development goals and things like that. We are doing X and by the way, we’ll tell you how we’re doing X, and get all the people out of our industry trying to tell us how to measure all this stuff and focus and put all the energy into actually making it happen.
In a second basic principle, unless capitalism solves the problem it's not going to be solved. Our government is struggling to reach a funding agreement on a trillion-dollar deficit. It’s not like that a lot of money is laying around to make things happen. You know, and that’s true of governments around the world. You know charity is a wonderful thing. But as we talked about earlier, our charitable commitment is $500 million a year. Would you rather have that or our $3 trillion balance sheet trying to help? Or our $60 billion expense space and how we spend our money. So, aligning capitalism is a very pragmatic decision in my mind, the problems aren’t going to get solved without it. And so, the stakeholder capital metrics about it. So that’s what we write up but we came at it in a very pragmatic way.
There were supposed to be 500 conferences in the year 2020 to talk about ESG metrics and sustainability metrics in North America alone. And teammates of mine have to go in and sort of say, “Don’t kill us with all these ideas.” We said, “We’ll give you a set of metrics before in the business community, here they are, and test us on it. So if you want to find out our turnover rate, or our diversity or our taxes paid.”
We have this big debate, our tax rate is low. The reason why it’s low is because we do low and moderate-income housing, we do wind and solar credits. And so, it’s 1,000 basis points off our tax rate. People say “Why’s the tax rate 11%?”, I say yeah, because we do that. You don’t want us to do that, our tax rate will go up, but I think for society it's better to do it. So, we can disclose all that and tell people that so it’s not like, you know, your local taxpayers, or, you know, we buy back stock, because there’s nothing else to do with the money. You know, our customers support it, our teammates’ minimum wage is $45,000 a year — your starting minimum wage for a high school kid, full benefits. We are investing heavily in all the things you say we want to invest in, it’s just after that we have capital we don’t need to support the business with. Of course, you buy back stock, because that makes the shareholders more willing to support the future. So you’re trying to get people to understand this is a system of which the capitalist system drives it and the metrics say whether we’re doing what we said we do, which is important accountability. And you know, Klaus had concepts that we’re able to reduce to metrics, which helps him then show that the 500 largest companies actually are driving progress and what the world wants. From going back to 190-some countries signed the sustainable development goals and said, “This is what the world wants from the development progress.” And so there’s not a mystery what the world wants, they said, “This is what we want.” And now we’re saying the private sector is doing it. And so instead of regulating us, hitting us over the head or whatever, push us.
And there you get an energy transition. If the oil companies are doing as well as the new energy companies, as well as advocates, you won’t get it if you push people out of the system say they’re they can’t participate because of who they are.
Alan Fleischmann
It’s amazing actually, and at the end of the day, the only way we’re going to make capitalism work is if we have that mentality of “We’re in it together and we actually need to push things forward together in a transformational way, not in a transactional way.” And the idea that you’re talking about investing, not just being donors.
Brian Moynihan
It just has a return on it. That’s the other thing is if you think about charity, its wonderful and has great psychographic returns. But at the end of day, by its nature you give it away and it’s gone. Where if you invest and it thrives and returns, it’s an infinite pool of capital.
Alan Fleischmann
And there’s growth and impact.
Brian Moynihan
Exactly, and that’s it. So impact measures, you know, we’ve worked with the rise funds and TPG. And if you looked at it, they were saying we can get private equity turns and measure the impact on top of it — that’s unbelievable, because that private equity, 50-70%, is now an infinite pool of capital. Now, they might find not every deal is possible, but they can find some. So what you’re trying to do is if you think about a curve from zero return all the way up to private equity returns, that what you’re trying to do is maximize the amount of capital aimed at solving these problems in a purely for profit way. As you make it make more sense, more and more capital floods in. And the government’s role is to provide incentives, or provide permitting incentives or, you know, in a developing country where it’s hard to take long-term risk, they can take the first losses. So they can help do it, what this does is have all the expense spaces of every company in the world dedicated towards making the progress on these things. That’s a hell of a purchase power versus the government trying to regulate it.
Alan Fleischmann
And the role of private industry. Well, here on Leadership Matters and in my life outside of Leadership Matters, we focus on CEO statesmanship and the need for CEOs and leaders in private industry to step up in ways where we’re just not going to see the kind of collaboration and cooperation or leadership always from the public sector as we need. And certainly not with the same urgency and quickness and time, understanding the markets and all that. So if there’s an example of a CEO statesman, it would be you, Brian, and you bring a lot of leadership as the CEO at the helm of Bank of America. But you do in another places to where you take that in order for us to actually challenge ourselves, think differently, and deploy capital in a way that actually is going to be beneficial to others. So big kudos to you. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for being on the show today. And I’d love to have you back. Because as you build out what you’re doing, as we see your leadership transcend across public, private and civil society, we want to bring you back and I want to talk about it.
Brian Moynihan
Thank you, Alan. It’s a pleasure being here and thank you for allowing people like myself to have a chance to have a long discussion about what we do.
Alan Fleishmann
You’re doing great things.