Yesterday's blog post recalls a memorable story I heard recently. During a class reunion at a prestigious university, one especially eminent member of the class was invited to speak. He got everyone's attention with this remark:

Some of us are successes, and some of us are failures.

Then, after a long pause, he added:

And only God knows which of us are which.

Words to ponder.

One oft-repeated recipe for success is to deliver more than you promise and to take the initiative to make life easier for your clients, your boss and those whose help you seek. However, some people demand precise adherence to their instructions and react badly when you deviate the slightest from them, never mind the reason.

I recently ran into just such a situation. A friend asked me about an exciting new business opportunity that has come his way. It's in a field unfamiliar to him, and he asked me to track down some expert guidance. I contacted such an expert on his behalf via e-mail. He instructed my friend to call him.

Hoping to save this expert significant time on the phone, we e-mailed him a background briefing to read at his convenience in advance of the call. It was less than twice the length of this blog post. We thought we were doing him a favor. Wrong.

Instead, the expert was very unhappy with this deviation from his instructions. Short as that background e-mail was, he shot back a terse reply that chided us for imposing unduly on his valuable time. I thus feared that he would be very abrupt with my friend during the subsequent call. To my extreme surprise and great relief he gave my friend all the time he needed to discuss his situation, and the call lasted well over an hour. Go figure.

Lesson: sometimes going the extra mile is a wasted trip.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower won his first race for the Presidency, outgoing President Harry S Truman observed that he was due for a rude awakening. "Poor Ike, he'll think this is like the army and that'll he'll just issue orders and expect that they get done," or words to that effect. Tuesday's defeat of former Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine in his reelection bid as governor of New Jersey brings Truman's words to mind.

Jon Corzine thrived in the frenetic environment of Wall Street, where things got done quickly, where high achievers like himself advanced rapidly, and where laggards were summarily fired. The often glacial ways of legislatures and government bureaucracies present a stark contrast. Before his first term in the U.S. Senate was over, Corzine apparently had lost patience with the protracted debate that marks its way of doing business, and ran for governor. As governor, he was repeatedly frustrated in dealing with the legislature, even though it was held by his own party. He will leave office largely unpopular and unmissed.

Jon Corzine successfully used his vast fortune to buy name recognition and to win election to high office. Most reports indicate that he has sunk over $120 million of his own money into his three races. However, despite outspending his chief rival by nearly a four to one margin in his reelection bid as governor, Corzine lost. The skills he developed in the world of Wall Street did not prove entirely transferable to the world of high elective office.

Gillian Tett's column in the October 9 Financial Times deals with an old problem in so many companies, and not just in the financial services industry: silo mentalities. That is, narrow tunnel vision that afflicts managers, especially when their incentive systems push them to maximize their own organizations' results (even to create personal fiefdoms run for their own benefit), sometimes to the detriment of the company as a whole.

Also, as Tett notes, silo mentality has been at the root of many regulatory failures of late. Regulatory agencies have their own narrow concerns and political interests (as do the members of their staffs), and often fail (or refuse) to see the big picture. Result: big problems slip between the cracks.

During my days in the high net worth marketing department at Merrill Lynch, we had ongoing fights with various constituencies in the firm afflicted by their own silo mentalities. Gaining cooperation to present holistic wealth management solutions to our richest and most influential clients often was an uphill battle, as counter-intuitive as that might seem at first blush.

Members of a corporation's financial staffs are in a unique position to battle silo mentality, tunnel vision or tribalism (other synonyms used by Tett), wherever it appears. You technically have a special fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interests of all shareholders. If you are in a controller's group at a sufficiently high or central level of the corporation, you'll probably be assembling and analyzing various metrics from across the enterprise, offering you the opportunity to see where silos are working at cross-purposes. Don't waste that chance.