Burning Bridges

We have talked a lot in class about the importance of building relationships with customers and how this is a crucial part of the selling process. You must build trust and then maintain it. When you believe in what you are selling and know that it will help the customer you are selling it to this should be a natural process.

In this movie scene from Margin Call, Kevin Spacey’s character has been told he must get his floor to sell off all of the hedge fund’s bad investments before their customers realize that they are not worth anything. He is extremely unhappy about this and pushes back against his superiors’ instruction. Eventually he ends up caving and going through with it on the condition that his employees get massive bonuses if they complete their task. He knows that his employees will have to destroy all of the business relationships they have developed over years of trading and will essentially be unemployable in finance if they do what he is instructing. He Informs them and makes it very clear that this is not what he wanted, yet, one way or another they will probably be out of a job soon so the best he could do was to negotiate for the bonuses as a way of easing the pain of “selling out” on their business relationships.

This movie is definitely worth watching and really captures the ways that professional aspirations can easily turn to greed which can ruin a company and the lives and relationships of everyone in it.