Michael Bloomberg: I like doing ten things a day, seven days a week.

Bloomberg: In the end everybody wants recognition and respect. But one of the pleasant surprises I had when I started working in politics is the quality of the 300,000 people who work for the New York City government. Many of them could make a lot more money in the private sector. Here, they deal with a world where sometimes it really is a matter of life or death; a world where the press is watching you all the time; and in some senses this is a much more difficult world in which to be a manager. But they get the recognition and respect – and if you want to keep them, you have to give them that.
In the private sector the standard way to attract good people is through compensation. In the public sector you can’t do it with money, so you do it by other means. I’m a big fan of delegation. I ran a company 24/7 worldwide with 10,000 people; now I have 300,000 people, but in this sense there is no meaningful difference between the company I ran before and this public institution: If you want to attract good people, you have to try to align incentives with your objectives, let them make decisions, and make sure they have the backing of their boss. You can’t have it both ways: You can’t hire people to run the company and then not let them do what they think is right.

Bloomberg: No. Some people in elective positions don’t delegate, they centralize. They are control freaks. But if you really want to make government work, you need to attract the best and brightest. I have been asked a thousand times what I think President Obama should do in his first hundred days in office. By way of an answer I say, let me tell you what I did in my first hundred days here: I focused on building a staff. The next question is always: “OK, but what did you actually do in the first hundred days?” Like I said, I focused on the staff. Today I’ve got 287 days left and I might not get re-elected, but even so we’re actively looking for a few commissioners to replace ones we’ve lost. People are the key. Fortunately, we still get an enormous number of people who want to work for this administration. They’re willing to run the risk. Why? For the money? No. It’s because working for this administration they’re going to be able to implement policies they think are intelligent and they want to try. If you are a traffic person you want to be able to change traffic lanes without having the mayor say, “If it’s politically unpopular, I’m not going to do it.” If you are somebody who is interested in public health, you want to have somebody who will support you when you want to implement a smoking ban.

Bloomberg: Consider this: A commissioner makes 180,000 dollars and will maybe supervise on average 10,000 people. How many executives who supervise 10,000 people in the private sector make 180,000 dollars?

Bloomberg: Well, when I got fired from Salomon Brothers nobody offered me a job and I was too pig-headed to go look for one, so starting a business was a relatively simple idea. I’d love to romanticize and tell you God appeared and said “Start a company!” but that wasn’t quite the real world. I’m not one of those people who go in for self-analysis. I made the decision to do it and I don’t remember having any regrets.

Bloomberg: In 1981 when I got fired, severance was not a concept, at least not at Salomon Brothers. I owned a piece of the firm, I was general partner and when we sold it I got roughly 10 million dollars. So I guess financial security was not top of my agenda. I thought it would be fun to be an entrepreneur. I’d worked for a big company. I’d been here, done that. I have an ego that tells me anything is possible if you work hard. But then maybe I’m not smart enough to assess the risks… I think you just go do it.

Bloomberg: There was a three-year process before we really had a product: The first year is easy, because you’re all fired up with enthusiasm. The last year is easy, because by that time you know that the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train coming towards you, but the end of the tunnel. The middle year was tougher. I remember that every two weeks I would write a check to put more capital into the company so that I could pay the payroll. At that stage there are times when you think, “I’m really going to waste away everything, then I won’t be able to get a job and I’ll starve.” But that didn’t happen.

Bloomberg: The most fascinating thing was that it was all new. When I started the company, PCs didn’t exist. We designed and built our own PCs. There was an engineer that I worked with up in Connecticut and I would go up on Saturdays and Sundays and solder transistors and resistors and capacitors onto a circuit board. The Internet didn’t exist, so we ordered telephone lines and put a modem in from here to Chicago. Then in Chicago we had a little rented space in a closet and we had lines going out to our three or four local customers. I came in on weekends and crawled under the desks and installed the terminals. That was all rewarding, because it was interesting; it was fun.

Bloomberg: It was a chance to make a difference. Everybody complains about the government. If I complain about something, I want to get in there and show you that I can do it better.

Bloomberg: The bull pen – open-plan offices – was a big innovation; nobody else had ever done a bull pen. They think everyone should have their own office. My own staff said: “Look, this is how we do it,” but I said: “No, this is what I want; this is the way we’ll do it.” In the beginning I was maybe a little isolated with my opinion. But in the end we took a vote – and there’s only one vote that counts – and we had a bull pen. Today everybody thinks this is the way to do it. Also, I don’t remember everybody being in favor of the smoking ban but today they’d never roll it back. I don’t remember everybody being in favor of investing in public hospitals and public housing, but those things are important to this city; they keep it going. That’s what leadership is all about.

Bloomberg: Certain industries work like this: If you don’t take your best salesmen to Vegas with their wives and give them rewards and whatever, you’re not going to keep them. That’s the ethics of those businesses. In the case of traders, if they make 100 million dollars for you, the bottom line is they think they’re going to get five million, and if you don’t give it to them, they will go join someone who will. The problem that federal government has is that they don’t live in a world where the United States is everything. They don’t make the rules for the vast bulk of the world. So if foreign banks are willing to pay somebody five million dollars, and the U.S. government doesn’t think they should be paid five million dollars, people are going to work for foreign banks. People are leaving the top banks for the non-top banks. For instance, as far as AIG is concerned, my main concern is the ten thousand people who work for AIG in New York City who make less than one hundred thousand dollars a year. These are our citizens. These people need jobs. It may very well be that the only way to keep AIG together is to hold your nose, stand up to all the public pressure – and the public is screaming for the heads of the people responsible for the crash – and hold firm.
The businessman in me says: If you want to help the car industry, close half the plants, close half the suppliers, close half the dealers. You will put a million and a half people out of work, but you will then downsize the industry to a sustainable level.
The public servant in me says: If you want to help the economy, you want to pump money in and keep an inefficient thing going because there’s no way out.
What will government do? Invariably government will say, “I want to do both,” which is the one thing it cannot do. But government can never accept an answer that requires either/or decisions; that’s not the way government works.

Bloomberg: I think he’s doing the right things and he has to explain to the public why we’re bailing out these financial institutions in a way that the public finds distasteful. He’s right, we have to fix the banks, because if we don’t, then the company that you or I work for making widgets is heading for trouble. So while we don’t like our tax dollars going to help bankers, it’s in everybody’s interests to do so.