Few institutional leaders, especially an experienced one as I was, have a long-term strategy when they take their jobs to build their endowments. In my case, that was (indistinct) so I was not a New Yorker. I didn’t know the environment. I had only come there recently. It took me a while to understand what was possible. But I quickly came to understand that you were highly dependent upon your trustees, their help, their guidance, their connections. After that, it was the quality of your ideas that made a difference, but you can’t paint a fence if there’s no fence. So, convincing the trustees of directions we needed to go, which with our trustees was not hard, and having the trustees help with the connections was basic.
