I found this speech interesting particularly given my short but memorable career at Merrill Lynch. Kind of sad to see the firm crash into the shoals.

MERRILL'S SMITH SPEAKS AT SHAREHOLDER MEETING

Winthrop H. Smith, Jr
December 5, 2008

Merrill Lynch & Co. Special Shareholder's Meeting

Thank you for allowing me to say a few words on this most important morning. I will say more about you in a moment, but I just wanted to thank you up front for your leadership and all you have attempted to do this past year.

Fellow Shareholders, I speak to you today as a 28 year employee, a shareholder and the son of one of the founding fathers of Merrill Lynch.

On January 6th, 1914, Charlie Merrill opened a one man shop just a few blocks from where we are today. A year later he was joined by his friend, Eddie Lynch and the first Merrill, Lynch & Co. was launched. One year later, my father joined the firm straight out of Amherst College. Thus began a wonderful partnership and friendship that lasted a life time.

Like Merrill Magowan I have been privileged to know every CEO of Merrill Lynch from Charlie Merrill to John Thain. Most of them,including John, were principled leaders who never placed their interests ahead of those of the firm. Most of them valued and promoted the principles that Charlie Merrill created and most of them cared deeply for the welfare of their fellow colleagues.

Merrill Lynch grew and thrived through the tough as well as the good times. By 2001 we were one of the most successful and respected global financial firms in the world with a stock price that hit $80 early that year. The ROI to both our employees and shareholders was superb. $100,000 invested in the MER IPO was worth $2.3 million in early 2001,But Merrill Lynch was more than a profitable company. It was a family. It was a culture. Merrill Lynch to so many of us was Mother Merrill, and it is so sad that the CEO who preceeded John Thain and the Board of Directors had no understanding of what that meant. Arthur Levitt, the former Chair of the SEC once commented that of all the Wall Street firms only Merrill Lynch had a soul. A soul! Can youimagine someone; much less the Chair of the SEC, saying a company had a soul? Well it did, because the tone, the culture, the ethics that we were all so proud of began that day, January 6th, 1914.

It began with Charlie Merrill's first rule that the Interests of the Customer always came first. It began with his partners' understanding that they were a Team and that no one's ego was more important than the team. It began with the knowledge that the primary assets of the firm went in and out of their door every day. They insisted on Respect for everyone. It began with an understanding that Merrill was part of a broader Community and that we had an obligation to support that community. It began with the simple belief that Integrity was everything and when a mistake was made, it was owned up to, corrected and never covered up. These principles of Charlie Merrill were passed to my father and then to Mike McCarthy, and subsequent CEOs and the culture endured because of the stories that were told to new Merrill Lynchers about our predecessors.

We knew the story of Charlie Merrill telling his clients to sell before the crash of 1929, of Don Regan testifying in Congress and saying "We goofed" and then making the clients whole for our mistake. We knew the story of Roger Birk realizing we erred in selling Baldwin United annuities to our clients and making them whole. We heard the story of Dan Tully facing down a CEO bully in his office when that person insulted one of Dan's teammates. Stories maintained the culture and created a bond between the founding partners and those who worked at Merrill 80 years later.

Merrill Lynch was a brand that we were so proud to wear on our heart and even our ties. We had a swagger, and we were damn proud to be part of "The Thundering Herd." We loved being the underdog and doing things others thought we couldn't accomplish. We were optimists that always knew we would get better and better and be number one in whatever we chose to pursue.

People like Bill Schreyer reminded us that he had never met a rich pessimist.

We even took on Goldman Sachs in the 80s and 90s, and by the time I resigned in 2001 they were damned scared that we were competing with them successfully everywhere in the world. YPF, Shanghai Petrochemical, China Telecom, Indosat, CVRD, Telefonica D'Espana were only some of the highly sought after privatization mandates that we won around the world. Our private client assets totaled $1.5 Trillion We were proud of our founders, we were proud of our leaders, we were proud of our colleagues, we were proud of what Merrill Lynch was in 2001.We were proud to be the leader in private wealth management. We were proud of our unique global footprint. We were proud of our leadership in both debt and equity underwriting as well as M&A. We were proud of our asset management business. But most of all we were proud ofour principles that we inherited from Charlie Merrill.

Many of us who have departed still get together. At one recent gathering a former senior executive of the Equity Division and now a successful executive elsewhere emailed this to the organizers. "I thought the setting was terrific, but it paled in comparison to the people gathered. What a wonderful collection of character and talent. Those years we had at Merrill were like catching lightening in a bottle!" That captures so much of what our culture created and what we felt and why Merrill was so successful! We were not about brick and mortar and cold numbers. We were about character, spirit, leadership, ethics and pride.

As one former CEO said to us when times got tough, "Just remember, we are the only firm that doesn't have to compete against Merrill Lynch."

At this point I want to make it very clear that I support the merger with Bank of America, and I am thankful for John Thain's clear and decisive leadership at that moment of crisis this fall. I am encouraged by the respect that Ken Lewis says he has for our great franchise and for the many thousands of fine professionals who are still part of the Merrill Lynch team. I do hope Ken and his colleagues at Bank of America will allow the firm that they bought to thrive under its new ownership, and that they will appreciate the strong culture that made Merrill what it was by 2001 and will also appreciate the many fine people who hung in and are still with Merrill Lynch, including members of my own family.

All of us want this new organization to succeed and become preeminent. We all know that what has occurred is the given reality and it is time to move forward. However, before we do. Some things need to be said for the record.

Today did not have to come. In the past it was Merrill Lynch that came to the rescue of Goodbody, White Weld and Becker. It was Merrill Lynch that strong and successful firms like Fenner & Beane, CJ Devine, Smith New Court, DSP in India, Midland Walwyn in Canada and Mercury Asset Management wanted to join. Merrill always thrived in times of turmoil and grew market share. Today did not have to come.

Today is not the result of the sub-prime mess or synthetic CDOs. They are the symptoms. This is the story of failed leadership and the failure of a Board of Directors to understand what was happening to this great company, and its failure to take action soon enough.

I stand here today and say shame to both the current as well as the former Directors who allowed this former CEO to wreak havoc on this great company.

Shame on them for allowing this former CEO to consciously and openly disparage Mother Merrill, throw our founding principles down a flight of stairs and tear out the soul of the firm.

In the fall of 2001, I was asked to remain as Vice Chairman of Merrill Lynch. But in a private meeting it was obvious that this CEO to be had no respect for our history, for our culture and for the five principles that had served us so well. I wanted to stay. My heart said stay. But I knew I could not. I would not have been able to look myself in the mirror each morning! That was a day I never thought could happen. Shame on members of the Board for never asking any of us who loved this firm, why we had to leave rather than remain part of something we could not in good conscience support. Some of us had the means to leave. Unfortunately many others did not and they will tell you how unpleasant it was. Just ask them.

Shame on these Directors for allowing this former CEO to rid the firm of thousands of years of experience. Shame of them for allowing this former CEO to surround himself with many people who did not have the perspective of other market cycles and the experience of time. Shame for allowing this CEO to surround himself with many people who did not share the same values that made us great and appreciate our winningculture.

Shame on them for allowing this CEO to cut costs andbusinesses so severely and bluntly for the sake of short term earnings that he cut out future growth. Shame on them for allowing him to over leverage the firm and fill the balance sheet with toxic waste to create short term earnings. Shame of them for allowing good people like Dan Bayly and a few others to be used as scapegoats to settle the US Government's Enron case against Merrill Lynch and for allowing these wonderful human beings and loyal Merrill Lynchers to go to Federal Prison unjustly. Fortunately, the Court of Appeals overturned the sentence.

Shame on them for not knowing the Merrill Lynch helicopter and plane and other perquisites were being used irresponsibly.

Shame, shame, shame for allowing one man to consciously unwind a culture and rip out the soul of this great firm. Shame on them for allowing this former Stan O'Neal to retire with a $160 million retirement package and shame on them for not resigning themselves.

I am not alone in these sentiments. So many former and present Merrill Lynchers share this anger - this sadness about what was allowed to occur. Just this week a former Merrill Lynch senior women executive emailed me and said,"It is heartbreaking to see what greed and the absence of principles did to MER, one of the finest companies in America."

What breaks my heart even more is to see the financial damage that has been inflicted on so many families that devoted their life to the Firm and to all our stakeholders.

Where is the accountability? No wonder that the Main Street that learned to trust Merrill Lynch in the 1940s has lost faith in Wall Street in 2008. Merrill Lynch is not alone in this. But in the past Merrill Lynch rose above the crowd and distanced itself from the greed that brought others down. Our principled leaders steered us through many challenges, and we emerged stronger because of them.

But I must give the Devil his due. I applaud the Board for selecting John Thain. John inherited a mess, but he did so many of the right things. He reached out to the past; he reached out to the people of Merrill Lynch around the world and showed them his humanity as well as his intelligence. John had the intellect, the experience, the humility, the common sense and the integrity to pull it off had not the markets melted down this past fall. Then he had the wisdom as Kenny Rogers sang to know when to fold them so that Merrill did not go the way of Lehman.

We thank you John not only for what you tried to do and what you did do. We thank you because we know you knew what Mother Merrill really stood for. As a competitor at Goldman Sachs you respected our past and our present and you were serious about restoring our valued principles once you became our leader.

I am personally pleased that you will be leading the new Merrill Lynch that will operate under the Bank of America umbrella. So many of us are hopeful that the brand will survive, that the strengths in Global Private Wealth Management and Global Investment Banking in particular will be recognized and maintained. We hope that you and your colleagues will continue to tell the stories that will maintain the principles and the culture that all began just down the block on January 6th, 1914 and enabled Merrill Lynch to be the firm it was in 2001.

Merrill Lynch has always been Bullish on America. Now we hope that you, John, and Ken Lewis will make sure that Bank of America will not only be Bullish on Merrill Lynch but will carry forward the Merrill Lynch principles along with those of Bank of America and continue a "Tradition of Trust" that will help to restore Main Street trust in Wall Street once again.

There are many parallels today with the world and the economy that existed in 1940 when Charlie Merrill and my dad and their talented teammates set upon the course of taking Wall Street to Main Street.

In 1999, Warren Bennis and Dan Heenan, two distinguished professors of business wrote a book called "Co-Leaders". One chapter was about the remarkable partnership and friendship that existed between Charlie Merrill and my father.

The closing two paragraphs read as follows:

"When Charlie Merrill and Winthrop Smith entered Wall Street, Americans were wary stock buyers. At most only 15% of households were in the market. Today almost half of the adult population has money socked away in equities. The financial world has changed, in large part because of these farsighted co-leaders. Investor confidence is at an all-time high. More people have money in the stock marker than every before.

Working together, Merrill and Smith made ordinary people bullish on America. Thanks to them, people's capitalism is a reality. Besides democratizing investing, they helped provide the US industry with much-needed capital for expansion. In tandem they were truly, in Merrill Lynch's famous catch phrase, "a breed apart." "

Now new co-leaders in the form of Ken Lewis and John Thain have that same golden opportunity - in fact the responsibility - to restore the trust and the confidence that Main Street must have in Wall Street as this time of turmoil. There is no reason why this new partnership of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch and its co-leaders of 2008 can not achieve for America and the World what Charlie Merrill and my father did 68 years ago.

While today did not have to come and should not have come, it did! So, I wish all at Merrill Lynch and their colleagues at Bank of America the best of fortune in the years ahead. This new firm can and should be the leading global investment firm in the years ahead. It should be great and make all of you who will be part of it as proud as we were of the Merrill Lynch we knew and loved!

I will end by saying to my many Merrill Lynch friends, my extended Merrill Lynch family around the World. Thanks for the memories.

No one can ever take those away.

It was a Hell of a run!

Dismantling a Wall Street Club
November 2, 2003

By LANDON THOMAS JR.

THE chief executive of Merrill Lynch, E. Stanley O'Neal, has never been big on clubs. To Mr. O'Neal, who grew up poor in a small Alabama town as a grandson of a slave, clubs symbolized one thing: exclusion.

Last June, Mr. O'Neal became a director at the New York Stock Exchange, the oldest and most exclusive club on Wall Street. So it is perhaps not surprising that he would keep his distance a few months later as his peers at the big Wall Street firms teamed up to force the resignation of its chairman, Richard A. Grasso.

Mr. O' Neal had made his views clear to Mr. Grasso earlier, telling him that he opposed the size of his compensation package. But when directors voted to oust Mr. Grasso at a momentous board meeting this September, Mr. O'Neal did not participate in the conference call, choosing instead to meet with a client.

''They run that place like a club, and I've never been part of that club,'' a Merrill Lynch executive said Mr. O'Neal told him as the furor over Mr. Grasso's $139.5 million in pay reached its apex.

Cool and austere, Mr. O'Neal is the antithesis of his predecessor, David H. Komansky, who masterminded the global expansion of Merrill Lynch and was a longtime director of the N.Y.S.E., serving on the compensation committee that awarded Mr. Grasso his infamous contract.

A great bear of a man, Mr. Komansky has a backslapping and gregarious nature, symbolizing both the cozy embrace of Mother Merrill, as the bank had come to be known, and the insider ties that made the Big Board hum under Mr. Grasso.

For Mr. O'Neal, Merrill Lynch, like the New York Stock Exchange, was too clubby for his tastes.

''It goes back to Mother Merrill,'' Mr. O'Neal said in an interview last week, sitting in an armchair in his corner office, which Mr. Komansky formerly occupied. ''People interpret it in different ways. I interpret it as a club. If you are part of the club, we take care of you. But this is a 47,000-person organization, and not everyone can be part of that club.''

Leaning forward in his chair, his deep voice rising a few notes, he added, ''I think clubs have their place, but not in modern commerce.''

MR. O'NEAL, 52, is a lean, wiry man, controlled in speech and disposition. His white shirt crackles with starch and his graying hair is tightly cropped. His eyes give nothing away. One gets the sense that every hour of his busy chief executive's life -- from the time he puts into raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for President Bush's re-election campaign to the half-hour he spends on the treadmill in his office at 5 p.m. each day -- is part of a much larger plan.

This December, Mr. O'Neal will celebrate his one-year anniversary as Merrill Lynch's chief executive. Since he was appointed president and heir-apparent in July 2001, he has presided over one of the most gut-wrenching restructurings that any Wall Street firm has experienced, erasing more than 23,000 jobs and ousting 19 senior executives.

The purge culminated in a fierce power struggle this summer when Thomas H. Patrick, and Arshad R. Zakaria, two senior Merrill executives who had supported his climb to chief executive, were pushed out by Mr. O'Neal. Mr. Patrick had lobbied a board member to have his mentor, Mr. Zakaria, promoted to become president and a potential successor to Mr. O'Neal, who opposed that idea. Then, in the fall, came the Grasso incident.

It may be fitting that both Merrill Lynch and the N.Y.S.E. have undergone such traumatic dislocations in the past year. Both are venerable institutions, run by a procession of insiders.

But the old-boy network that has long provided the lubrication for the industry's great money-making machine is fraying, as shown by the demise of Mr. Grasso and the continued ascent of Mr. O'Neal, a former factory foreman and the first African-American to lead a major Wall Street firm.

Mr. O'Neal concedes that his rise from a house without plumbing in Roanoke, Ala., to a pinnacle of American capitalism has been unusual.

''I didn't even know what an investment bank was 30 years ago,'' he said. ''I could not have described it to you. And I certainly never thought I would be running a company, especially this company. I've been lucky.''

Mr. O'Neal earned a bachelor's degree in industrial administration from the General Motors Institute (now known as Kettering University), a cooperative college run by the company in Flint, Mich. He started as a factory foreman at G.M. and then received a master of business administration degree from Harvard.

Mr. O'Neal later joined G.M.'s treasury office in New York, where he worked on some of the company's biggest deals in the 1980's. In 1987, he accepted an offer to move to Merrill Lynch, working in the firm's high-yield bond department. In 1998 he became chief financial officer.

In a profession where success is measured by relationships, Mr. O'Neal is something of an anomaly. Most successful Wall Street chief executives are inveterate schmoozers, masterful at the art of selling their services as brokers or investment bankers to corporate clients.

It is a people business, and Mr. Komansky, as well as Henry M. Paulson Jr. at Goldman Sachs and John J. Mack at Credit Suisse First Boston, have risen to the top largely because of their uncanny ability to rub elbows with their clients.

Mr. O'Neal, on the other hand, is a numbers man. While he will engage in the client work that is a condition of his job, he has a reputation as a loner, with few close friends at the bank. He is known within the firm for preferring a night with his wife and twins, a daughter and a son, over a wine-soaked client dinner.

And on nights when the rest of his family members are at the weekend home on Martha's Vineyard, he will occasionally dine alone at Nicola's, a restaurant near his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Dispassionate and clinical, he rose through the ranks at both Merrill and General Motors by mastering the mysteries of spreadsheets and financial models.

His sharp eye for the bottom line, combined with what colleagues describe as a rugged streak of independence, led him to conclude as early as 1998 that the global expansion strategy being undertaken by Mr. Komansky was potentially flawed. One of Mr. O'Neal's first jobs as chief financial officer was to prepare a report on the bank's financial condition and present it to the firm's management committee.

''What was supposed to be a 45-minute presentation turned into about two and a half hours,'' Mr. O'Neal said. ''What was easy to see was the cost structure. It was incredibly visible. The question was how does one get at it. But I was not in a position to do anything about it.''

THE bull market was just hitting its stride. Merrill Lynch, a firm founded on providing financial advice to the Main Street investors of America, now viewed itself as a truly global firm, capable of managing bond deals for the Chinese government and selling mutual funds to Japanese homemakers.

Such ambitions are not achieved on the cheap. Merrill spent billions on global acquisitions, including $5.3 billion to buy Mercury Asset Management of Britain in 1997. That deal and others were later seen by analysts as overpriced and strategically misguided.

Identified as a rising star, Mr. O'Neal was appointed in 2000 as president of firm's sprawling network of brokers, a traditional locus of power within the firm. As the stock market began its collapse that year, Mr. O'Neal traveled the country, speaking to brokers. He concluded that the market's downward spiral was going to be a long one and that Merrill, given its financial state, was especially vulnerable.

''This was a major correction,'' he says now. ''Combine that with our visibly high cost base and the fact that we had undermaximized the value of our fixed-income trading franchise and that we had become overextended internationally. If you called these assumptions into question, you had to question if we had gone too far.''

Mr. O'Neal's vision was shared by Mr. Patrick, himself a former chief financial officer. Mr. Patrick retained close ties to Robert P. Luciano, an influential director. Both Mr. Patrick and Mr. O'Neal made it clear to Mr. Luciano that Merrill needed to cut costs. The board agreed, and when Mr. O'Neal was appointed president in 2001, he began to put a plan into place.

Even by Wall Street standards, the plan was brutal. Mr. O'Neal shrank the firm by a third and sent a cadre of senior executives packing. Even today, despite two consecutive quarters of billion-dollar profits and a surging stock price, the feelings are raw.

This fall, Winthrop H. Smith Jr., a former president of the firm's international private client network who left the firm when Mr. O'Neal took over, gave a speech at Duke University's business school celebrating the old Mother Merrill culture. He questioned whether Mr. O'Neal had what it took to follow in the line of illustrious Merrill Lynch chairmen like Charles E. Merrill, Donald Regan and Daniel Tully.

''Stan is a relative newcomer to Merrill Lynch,'' Mr. Smith, the son of a Merrill Lynch founder, said in his speech. ''He is an extremely bright and able person who like Charlie Merrill came from a humble background and did not receive a traditional education,'' Mr. Smith said. ''But, I am not sure that he has heard or yet fully appreciates the Merrill Lynch stories and may not be able to embrace the culture in the same fashion as his predecessors. Time will tell.''

In his speech, a rare instance of a former Merrill Lynch senior executive publicly criticizing a current chief executive, Mr. Smith also pointed out that under Mr. O'Neal, Merrill's market share in debt and equity underwriting had declined, that its assets under management had shrunk and that its army of financial advisers had been reduced by 7,000.

Mr. Smith asked his audience: Can Mr. O'Neal, with a new team of leaders not schooled in the old principles and culture of the firm, keep Merrill Lynch as an industry leader? ''The jury is still out,'' he said, while adding that, as a shareholder, he hoped the answer was yes.

It is a valid concern, and other Merrill watchers question whether Mr. O'Neal has become too reliant on cost-cutting and bond trading to drive profitability.

Because of a paucity of investment banking deals over the past two years, Mr. O'Neal, like other Wall Street chief executives, has devoted considerable resources to sustaining the rich trading profits gleaned from the bond market. And Merrill's earnings, along with its share price, have surged as a result.

But with the recent upturn in growth, and a possible future increase in interest rates, the easy profits to be made from bond trading are probably finished, analysts say. Investment banking and other advisory work will be expected to pick up the slack.

Given a series of recent high-level departures from Merrill's banking business, however, some wonder whether Merrill's investment banking business will be as competitive as it has been in the past.

In an hourlong interview, Mr. O'Neal spent hardly a minute discussing Merrill's investment banking business, preferring to talk about plans to strengthen its retail network and mortgage trading capabilities.

This summer, a top-ranked team of media bankers left Merrill for Credit Suisse First Boston. Normally, when a team of top bankers is looking to leave a firm, a chief executive will try to intervene with a phone call, offering more money or other inducements to stay. The bankers declined to comment.

But according to one former Merrill Lynch banker, Mr. O'Neal made no such move. ''I think the banking franchise has suffered,'' the banker said. ''It's probably too soon to reach a definitive conclusion, but bankers don't really think that Stan cares what happens to the investment banking business.''

That being said, investment banking and advisory revenue increased by 37 percent last quarter compared with the same period a year ago, as the deal-making environment improved.

Mr. O'Neal's supporters say criticism from former Merrill Lynch executives should be taken with a grain of salt. Merrill, much more than other Wall Street firms, had a culture that in many ways became a belief system for its top leaders. The rewards, financial and otherwise, were considerable. But, as Mr. O'Neal found out, financing a belief system can be hazardous in a bear market.

''I don't know what Mother Merrill means,'' Mr. O'Neal said. ''To the extent that it is paternalistic and maternalistic, I don't think that is healthy. While it may spell out a sense of comfort to some, by definition it also excludes, and I guess there is something instinctive in me that rebels against that.''

Not all former Merrill executives are critical of Mr. O'Neal. Herbert M. Allison Jr., a former president of Merrill who was an early promoter of Mr. O'Neal's career and gave him a senior banking job in the early 1990's, sees Mr. O'Neal as being on the right track. ''Stan took over at Merrill Lynch at a very difficult time,'' Mr. Allison said. ''He is very bright and capable, and I'm not surprised by his ascent. I believe he is capable of building upon Merrill's position in the marketplace.''

Mr. O'Neal recognizes how traumatic his moves have been for Merrill, and to a certain extent he was upset by the resulting furor.

''The one regret I have is the controversy,'' he said, referring to the dismissals of Mr. Patrick and Mr. Zakaria, among others. ''Would I have liked to have avoided it? You bet. But I don't regret any of the results for sure. Contrast and speed causes controversy, and we did not have the luxury of a lot of time.''

MERRILL'S management team is now the youngest and most diverse on the Street. Most are in their early 40's, --and they include an Australian, a South Korean and an Egyptian, some of whom have less than 10 years of experience with the firm.

Since the departures of Mr. Patrick and Mr. Zakaria, Mr. O'Neal has taken steps to strengthen his management team, in response to criticism that he might have been too aggressive in excising the carriers of Merrill Lynch's culture. In August, for example, he recruited Robert J. McCann, a top executive who had left the firm, to return as vice chairman for Merrill's wealth management group.

Mr. O'Neal remains resolute, however, in his decision not to appoint a president and eventual successor.

''Look, I'm 52 years old, and theoretically my tenure is at least a couple more years,'' he said with a laugh. ''We have a great management team, but we also have people who are new to their roles. To put a time frame on it is a total artifice and it does not do anyone any good.''

By all accounts, Mr. O'Neal commands the full support of his board. Some former Merrill Lynch executives say that Mr. Luciano, long seen as the most influential director on the board, has had his role marginalized because of his active alliance with Mr. Patrick in promoting Mr. Zakaria as a potential candidate for president.

That said, even the many former Merrill Lynch executives who still bear a grudge against Mr. O'Neal acknowledge that morale within the firm has improved sharply, in line with the company's stock price, which is up more than 50 percent this year.

Still, there remains a modicum of fear. Mr. O'Neal, much more than past Merrill Lynch bosses, is a stern taskmaster who has little patience for small talk. A member of Merrill's executive committee describes him as being one of the toughest, most demanding bosses he has ever had.

A former Merrill executive says that Mr. O'Neal, not happy with the way a conversation was progressing, once declared abruptly that the meeting was over.

Mr. O'Neal acknowledges that he is no glad-hander and that for him, results will always have a higher premium than relationships. ''I don't try and instill fear in anybody,'' he said. ''But we all get paid a lot of money to deliver. Why be in a position of leadership guiding one of the greatest institutions ever created when you are not doing your best? Then you are just taking up space.''