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Being Clutch in the Clutch
By Frances McMorris
February 4, 2011
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How does a star trial lawyer beat back Bill Gates and AIG to win hotly contested legal cases? How does a chieftain at a financial services firm save company face before a Senate subcommittee? How does an actor deliver a brilliant monologue in a challenging and controversial play? And how does a sergeant guide his men to safety and save his commanding officer’s life while under enemy fire?
These are some of the examples that author Paul Sullivan lays out in his book: Clutch: Why Some People Excel Under Pressure and Others Don’t.
Sullivan, the “Wealth Matters” columnist for The New York Times, argues that there is a real difference between some of the great sporting moments that we perceive as so-called clutch moments and others in many other situations.
The great game-winning shot may not be due to a clutch performance but rather on luck. To Sullivan, it appears that consistency of performance is a defining feature of a clutch performance.
Rather than laying out a chart of the five traits that comprise clutch—focus, discipline, adaptability, blocking out all distractions or being present and the twin faces of fear and desire—Sullivan illustrates many of those attributes admirably throughout the book published last year by Portfolio/Penguin.
The book is an easy read as Sullivan talks about those who choke under pressure (including himself as a golf player) and those who always seem to step up in scenarios that make other mere humans crumble.
Sullivan spent much time talking to his subjects such as trial lawyer David Boies who successfully represented the government in the antitrust case against Microsoft and represented Hank Greenberg, the former chief executive of AIG in a $4.2 billion battle against his old insurance company; actor Larry Clarke and playwright David Rabe in a restaging of the Vietnam War-era play Streamers; tarnished golf sensation Tiger Woods and several others. He brings a reporter’s touch to a subject that could have been a mere recital of incidents based on other sources.
Considerable time is spent on examples from the financial services sector–whether it is Mark Branson, the chief financial officer for UBS global wealth management testifying before a congressional subcommittee about the recent tax evasion scandal or the financial crisis and how it affected the reputations of J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and Bank of America’s Ken Lewis. Obviously, Sullivan heralds Dimon as the clutch performer and Lewis as the man who choked. “The explanation for why this happened lies in the old-fashioned notion of personal responsibility,” Sullivan writes, describing what he considers to be one of the three causes of choking.
While I don’t think that all Sullivan’s examples work (one of the entrepreneurs used to underscore fear and desire), overall he gives readers substantial real-life situations from which they can learn how to perform well and consistently in challenging circumstances. Sullivan makes one thing clear: becoming a clutch performer takes hard work. “Being clutch,” he writes, “means performing your best under pressure regardless of what that pressure is.”
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Growth -- the kind measured in revenue and profits -- is the ultimate goal for the entire brokerage industry. As On Wall Street editor-in-chief Frances McMorris points out, figuring out how to achieve these goals while dealing with constant change is what firms like Raymond James and its competitors are now learning to do on the fly.
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Frances McMorris was named editor-in-chief of ON WALL STREET in February 2008, after serving as executive editor since December 2004. She also created and serves as the host of AdvisorTV, an online video interview show appearing at onwallstreet.com.
From indictments to verdicts and appeals, Ms. McMorris has covered many major, high-profile cases in both federal and state courts as a legal affairs reporter for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News, Newsday and The New York Law Journal. The cases that she has covered include: the seditious conspiracy trial of Sheik Oman Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric convicted of being the spiritual mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center; the constitutional battle over the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy; the Crown Heights riot murder trial; federal racketeering cases against violent gangs; the Long Island pet cemetery trial and several securities fraud and insider trading cases, among others.
The legal issues she has written about are diverse and numerous, ranging from economic espionage to employment discrimination rulings and the first story to report that there is no expectation of privacy for employee emails written in the workplace.
Ms. McMorris is a 1993 graduate of Fordham University School of Law and admitted to the New York and New Jersey bars. She has appeared on the former CNNfn to give expert commentary on trials.
She also served as president of the Newswomen’s Club of New York for three years while working as an assistant managing editor at The Daily Deal in New York.
ON WALL STREET magazine has a circulation of more than 90,000—reaching financial advisors and brokers at the most prestigious brokerage firms who serve high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth investors.
FEED
Frances McMorris was named editor-in-chief of ON WALL STREET in February 2008, after serving as executive editor since December 2004. She also created and serves as the host of AdvisorTV, an online video interview show appearing at onwallstreet.com. 
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