My Ethics class interviewed a successful Harvard MBA who also had a law degree from another Tier One university. He worked for many years in the oil and gas industry, including, at one point, working for three Fortune 500 Corporations in Midland, Houston, San Antonio, India, and Abu Dhabi. Our interviewee, who wants to be anonymous, left the energy sector in the late 1980s and worked for 25 years, investing in a large retirement, investment, and insurance group. Since then, he has spent several years as a private investor.
The interviewee was invited because all my students wanted to understand investing in a very interesting time. The current situation is difficult for many of us to understand, much less your future employees and my students. The advice was simple: do not invest in the stock market with money you do not have. First, you must pay your bills, feed your family, and save for a rainy day. I refer to Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs. The first two of which are:
Physiological Needs: These are the most basic needs for survival, including air, water, food, shelter, sleep, and warmth.
Safety Needs: This level focuses on security and stability, including financial security, health and well-being, and protection from harm.
In other words, buy a practical vehicle, do not be house-poor, and remember that things break. AI provides this definition for those of you who do not know what house-poor means. It means a homeowner spends a disproportionately large amount of their income on housing expenses, including mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance, and maintenance, leaving little to no money for other necessities, savings, or discretionary spending. Essentially, they’re burdened by the high cost of owning a home, making it difficult to manage their finances.
Returning to the interview, one of our questions was about what books influenced your investment success the most. His answer is Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which was written in 1776. Smith introduced key concepts such as the division of labor, productivity, free markets, and the role prices play in resource allocation.
Another question: what was your most significant investment mistake? His answer was enlightening for my students. Right out of school, he invested in the futures market when he did not have the capital to do it. One of those regulatory agencies we love so much made a decision on a Friday that would bankrupt him and many others. Like many successful people, he admitted to the arrogance of youth. Ultimately, an almost unheard-of weekend Supreme Court decision saved him and many large investors. His honesty about his financial blunder, amounting to several hundred thousand dollars in the 1970s and now equal to approximately 2.5 million dollars, astonished my students. Hopefully, the saying, the folly of youth comes to mind because it was true for the interviewee. He said he would never invest again unless he could afford to lose the investment.
He shared a bit of humor with us when he cited this quote by Thomas Sowell: “In every disaster throughout American history, there always seems to be a man from Harvard in the middle of it.”
A few notable graduates associated with Harvard degrees and leadership include Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Theodore Roosevelt, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Michael Bloomberg, John Roberts, Al Gore, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Arne Duncan, Elizabeth Warren, Mark Zuckerberg, and Ben Bernanke.
I am sharing our interview highlights because, as a leader, you should mentor or provide resources for your employees to make sound financial decisions.
What does that look like? In these uncertain times, encourage your employees to contribute to their 401K, Roth, etc. They need to put the money in and never take it out. That means your investment consultants must advise your employees appropriately.
Those investments are for their senior years and are not a savings account. There are also cash accounts that earn a decent rate of interest. Providing information at a fundamental level is very important. No one reads all those wordy documents, and many of your employees do not have the reading skills to understand them. Those are just the facts.
If they are counting on Social Security, they better think again. Things are changing. According to social media on April 10, 2025, the Social Security Administration (SSA) would use the social platform X to make announcements instead of traditional press releases or memos typically posted to the agency’s website. It is a good thing I have an X account. In truth, the X rumor was proven untrue by April 13, 2025, and was just another social media story.
We must encourage our employees to read social media with a grain of salt, but that is a topic for
Michele Harmon
“Your employees are the heart of your organization.” Dr. Michele Harmon is a Human Resource professional, supporting clients in Texas and New Mexico that range in size from five to more than 3,000 employees. Email: micheleharmon1@gmail.com.
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