Robert Rubin - Fortune Article, Harvard Commencement, Interviews on Charlie Rose, Book

Fortune Article - 2003

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Part of Rubin's approach to decisions at the Treasury was to put them off as long as possible. Some people might call that procrastination; Rubin called it getting that one last fact or well-judged opinion, from whoever at the table might offer it, that might make a decision the right one. Geithner says the young members of the Treasury staff would on occasion rush into Rubin's office, imploring him for a decision about something consequential. Rubin's first question would often be, "How much time do we have before we have to decide?" Summers tabs this Rubin's habit of "preserving his optionality."

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He has less serious habits, of course, and the Treasury team got to know them all. Rubin quit wearing a watch about 20 years ago--he thought it made him too conscious of time--and he doesn't carry a briefcase, instead toting what he needs in brown, expandable legal folders jammed under his arms. At the office he likes to work in stocking feet. For the 6 1/2 years he was in Washington--he tends to be very precise about that elapsed time--he lived like a bachelor at the Jefferson Hotel, flying to New York on weekends to rejoin his wife. He reads voraciously, keeping several pieces of fiction and nonfiction going at once. But he is largely oblivious to popular culture: His staff found that he hadn't heard of Aretha Franklin or Eartha Kitt, and until corrected he thought that Jimmy Buffett was Warren's son. He also once suggested to the board of the American Ballet Theatre, on which he sat, that it help along a cost-reduction drive by cutting 10% of the swans in Swan Lake. His advice, he says, was not well received.

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Harvard Commencement - 2001

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I am deeply honored to be your commencement speaker today. A little over forty years ago, I arrived as a freshman at Harvard College, from a public school in Miami Beach, Florida. I remember the first day of orientation, when the incoming freshman class met together at Memorial Hall, and the acting Dean of Freshman said, as an effort at reassurance, that only 2% of the incoming class would fail out. I felt that I was providing enormous protection to the rest of my incoming classmates, because in my mind I was going to fall short so colossally as to fill that whole 2% all by myself.

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However, I remained, and my Harvard experience reshaped the intellectual framework through which I viewed everything that came my way, including the decision-making that has been the critical core of my professional life, both on Wall Street and in government. My views on that critical function of decision-making derived from my life's activities and formatively and powerfully from my Harvard experience, will be the primary focus of my remarks today, because I believe that decision-making will be at the core of your lives, too, no matter what you do. The only question will be how well you make those decisions.

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Interviews on Charlie Rose

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His Book: In an Uncertain World