Bruce Greenwald Receives CBS Lifetime Achievement Award
Published on Sep 14, 2016
Professor Bruce Greenwald holds the Robert Heilbrunn Professorship of Finance and Asset Management and is co-director of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing at Columbia Business School.
On May 2, 2016, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at Columbia Business School’s Centennial Dinner.
:08
alright I’ll be honest with you this is gonna be the slacker response which I
0:16
may be appropriate at this point in the evening show when we celebrated Joyce
0:21
dignitaries fifty years of teaching he noted that at 12 years old he really had
0:27
a vision and he saw himself becoming a professor now that’s a considerable
0:33
coincidence cuz it twelve-years-old I had a vision and i got to exactly the
0:37
same place in a slightly different way my vision was that I had to find a job
0:43
right and have to wake up before nine o’clock in the morning more than two
0:47
days a week and that man I was gonna become a professor to given that
0:54
extraordinary beginning I think you’ll understand that while I am very very
0:59
pleased to get this award I am also more than a little surprised and in fact I
1:07
think what I would like to do is that I would like to recognize the extent to
1:11
which getting this award has depended I’m pretty ruthlessly exploiting a whole
1:17
bunch of sets of people who have made extraordinary contributions to my career
1:22
for which I have relentlessly been willing to take credit first and
1:27
foremost of that as I think he has my students it has been an extraordinary
1:33
experience teaching at columbia business school that the students have been
1:38
extraordinarily engaging an extraordinarily intelligent and to be
1:42
really honest a lot of what is in those books and actually we’re gonna write a
1:46
much better version of the value investing book is attributable to ideas
1:51
generated by those students so first of all I would like to thank the students
1:56
and alumni they’ve become for that I am always felt that I think my friends will
2:06
concede this a walking generator of the need for trigger warnings
2:13
what I am also thankful for from that student population is the extent to
2:19
which they’re sort of genial disregard for most of what I think has meant that
2:24
I’ve never gotten in trouble for it and I would like to thank them all for that
2:30
also but more seriously and I think you just saw an example of it here and you
2:35
will see an example of it with the next honoree but I’m happy to take credit for
2:40
the extraordinary work at columbia business school graduates have done in
2:45
the world and I think if you look at things that have had a big impact and
2:50
here the one that comes to mind is the emergence in China hundreds of millions
2:56
of people from poverty it really while in the long run it’s important to have
3:01
scientists and lawyers and government types and even idea or send reporters
3:06
but what happened in China was professional business people running
3:11
organizations extraordinarily efficiently and those are my students to
3:15
some extent at least in spirit
3:25
the second which argued as much more quickly as I have had the privilege of
3:30
working under the supervision of two extraordinary deeds now I’m not going to
3:36
name names except for four because once you start naming names Reuters gonna
3:40
forget somebody and you’re going to get him real trouble but I think they know
3:44
who they are and I think you know who they are and I am of course extremely
3:48
thankful to them for a long rich and in my case administration free career at
3:56
Columbia Business School I would really like to thank and here I think it is
4:03
important to recognize that value investing is a community and it is a
4:08
community that runs from Graham and dog through obviously Warren Buffett but
4:13
there are a lot of significant contributors and it has been an honor
4:18
and a privilege to be part of that community both for intellectual reasons
4:23
as I say I’m always happy to write books that encompass other people’s ideas and
4:28
get credit for them but also because actually remarkably little trouble to
4:34
myself we have generated a program that I honestly think I can say is the
4:39
premier program and investing now and business schools people will say they
4:44
don’t hire from Harvard they don’t hire from Stanford they hire the kids from
4:48
this program and as I said I had almost nothing to do with it and now I’m going
4:53
to name three names Aaron Melissa Monet Louisa Schneider and Meredith true
4:58
batting managed to put together this program
5:08
we have no more than one meeting a week with me at Metro diner and it wasn’t
5:14
allowed to go on for more than an hour so I owe a great thanks to them finally
5:21
I’ve also obviously had a career in research and there I really have some
5:25
advice for people you will notice that all those books or co-authored it is
5:32
something that I heartily recommend and this is where I’m gonna do by quote when
5:37
George Bernard Shaw was fifty years old he was interviewed and asked why was he
5:44
still living at home at fifty years old with his mother and he gave a very
5:48
sensible answer he said look while all his contemporaries were throwing
5:53
themselves into the struggle four success in life he decided to throw his
5:59
mother and he was really happy with that decision so large final part of my
6:06
success has been my willingness to rely on co-authors on one of them in
6:12
particular I have always been willing to throw Joe Stiglitz into the struggle for
6:17
life and it’s always worked out really well it’s something I’d advise other
6:22
people to do if they can get away with it and I hope that that relationship has
6:27
been as enjoyable and rewarding for him as it’s been for me but if it has no I
6:34
can live with that
6:36
conclusion I would really like to thank everybody here in all those capacities
6:44
who has made this possible for a kid who is as far as possible from the
6:49
characterization that was offered up here a minute ago thank you
