But two weeks ago Chase chairman William Harrison shocked Wall Street by announcing that Chase was acquiring the small New York investment firm Beacon Group, and installing its founder, Geoff Boisi, as the new head of investment banking, Jimmy Lee’s old job. But when Harrison added that Lee would remain Chase’s dealmaking king, the shock turned to skepticism. Ceding power on Wall Street has never been viewed as a good thing. In that world of big money and even bigger egos, accumulating power is even more important than amassing wealth. When someone talks, as Lee did, of “spending more time with my family,” that is usually code for getting sacked.
But Jimmy Lee says he isn’t going anywhere. “My bags are not packed,” he insists. Sure, he admits that he balked when Harrison first proposed he become part of an unusual power-sharing arrangement with Boisi. But Harrison wasn’t asking Lee to leave or even give up his status as a vice chairman and member of the powerful executive committee. He was responding to persistent complaints from Lee that the 24-7 demands of managing 4,000 people worldwide left no time for his family and took him from the dealmaking he relished. Seeing an opportunity to bring in the talented Boisi (who starts July 1), Harrison called Lee’s bluff. Over three months of negotiations, Harrison convinced Lee he was giving him what he asked for: freedom to concentrate on dealmaking and, most important, Lee says, an opportunity to make it to all those parent-teacher conferences and dance recitals he’d been missing.
In the macho arena where Lee thrived, he knew that talking about family values could brand him at best a wimp and at worst a liar. “In the power alleys of Wall Street and the East Coast, it’s not manly to admit that work/family is an issue,” Lee shrugs. “In fact, the manly thing is to say, ‘I don’t have a life and I’m proud of it’.” And true to form, rumors have raced through Chase that Lee is being pushed out. Many on Wall Street are skeptical of the arrangement and believe that Lee will eventually leave. But Lee, with characteristic zeal, now preaches the importance of family and even fired off an emotional memo to Chase employees confessing his past parental neglect. He admitted to missing too many soccer games and school functions involving his oldest child, Lexi, 18, a high-school senior. “I can’t go back,” he wrote, “but I can avoid repeating the same mistake with my son Jamie (16) and other daughter Izzy (9).”
Jimmy Lee says his life, or complete lack thereof, is what drove this deal. Up at 5 a.m. each day, Lee prides himself in getting to the office first and literally switching on the lights. Usually the last to leave, he arrives at his Darien, Conn., home at 10 p.m. The job of rearing his three children fell to his wife of 20 years, Beth. Even when he coached his son’s Little League team, he shoehorned it in by racing an hour back to Manhattan after each game. “I felt proud of it,” he says.
All that changed last December. While meeting with Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers in San Francisco, Lee was interrupted with an urgent phone call from his daughter, Lexi. Fearing the worst, he rushed to take the call in Chambers’ private office. But Lexi had happy news: she had just been accepted to Williams College, her father’s alma mater. Lee was overcome with emotion, but it was not tears of joy. It was anguish that he wasn’t there to hug his daughter and had missed another important moment in her life. “I’m sitting in John Chambers’ office and looking at all these pictures of him with his family and thinking, “Where did the years go?” he recalls. “I had not gone to one parent-teacher conference at her school. I didn’t know any of her teachers’ names. I just wasn’t involved.” It was the same with his other children. “My little one, I didn’t even know what grade she was going into,” Lee admits, his eyes rimming with tears.
That epiphany forced Lee to take stock of his family life. He gave himself an A+ on the job, but a C- at home. He also was haunted by the loss of his own father, a successful businessman who died of a heart attack at 47–the age Lee is now. “Growing up without a father was very hard,” he says. “You had no one to pat you on the back, to share with or to ask questions.”
Despite his fatherly guilt, Lee still initially resisted Harrison’s proposal to cut back. For career advice, Lee turned to Dan Case, head of the Silicon Valley investment bank Hambrecht & Quist, which Chase acquired last year. Case, older brother of AOL chairman Steve Case, shared his mantra of “less is more” with Lee. “I learned a lot from watching Dan,” says Lee. “Out there in California, this is pretty accepted stuff. In command-and-control Wall Street, it is not.” Case, who last week canceled a meeting with the king of Jordan to attend his son’s preschool graduation, says he told Lee: “If you haven’t got balance in your life, what’s the point of rank and riches?”
Last Thursday evening Lee took his new management style out for a test drive. As he raced to daughter Izzy’s school art fair–one of his first visits ever to her school–he was on the cell phone with Dan Case, planning a meeting with Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Ever the hard charger, Lee still intends to start his workday before dawn, but now he is hoping to get home in time for dinner. “I don’t expect to turn into some laid-back guy,” he says. “What I have to do is funnel some of my drive into my personal life.” And given his appearance at the Pear Tree School, Jimmy Lee boasts that his latest deal with his 9-year-old daughter is “already providing some yield.”
It’s much too early to declare Jimmy Lee father of the year. If his experiment in work-family balance works, he could become an inspiration for working fathers everywhere who now struggle, as women have for so long, to find room in their lives for career and family. But the power-sharing arrangement could fail and Lee might not be able to reform his workaholic ways. “This thing looks very good on paper,” says Harrison. “But there are no guarantees in life.” Indeed, this could be the hardest deal Jimmy Lee has ever had to close.
