Fred Goodwin Quotes

It was funny how so many men were defined by their downfall. Caesar, Fred Goodwin, Trotsky, Harvey Weinstein, Hitler, Jimmy Savile. Women hardly ever. They didn’t fall down. They stood up.

A regulator cannot easily challenge the fundamental strategy of a badly run financial services business, such as Lehman or Royal Bank of Scotland. No one within the businesses themselves was willing to challenge Dick Fuld or Fred Goodwin—including the genuinely distinguished figures who sat on the RBS board (that of Lehman was decorated by friends of Fuld). Even the head of an agency may enjoy less access to the powerful than the senior executives of large corporations—if for no other reason than that the latter have considerably more largesse to dispense. Recall Gordon Brown’s fulsome tribute to Fuld and Lehman (see Chapter 1), and note that Goodwin and his (then) wife enjoyed weekend hospitality at Chequers, Prime Minister Brown’s official residence, even as the bank was sliding towards bankruptcy. It is not an accident that both Lehman and RBS were run by unpleasant, domineering individuals with good political connections: these characteristics are common pointers to the combination of personal success and corporate failure. Now

The next week, Finian’s Rainbow began a twelve-week filming schedule. Jerry Jackson recalled that when Coppola was unhappy with Pan’s choreography he would ask him (Jackson) to change it rather than approach Pan directly—so poor was the working relationship between director and choreographer. Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise suggest that the tension between them may have had less to do with Pan’s work and more to do with the challenge he presented to Coppola’s authority: “Coppola described Pan as ‘a disaster.’ That probably means that Pan disagreed with him or insisted that the camera serve the choreography, not vice versa, or asked for more rehearsal time for the numbers” (Goodwin 1989, 79). After the filming of “That Great Come-and-Get-It Day” in which Pan makes his final on-screen appearance shining shoes in a barbershop vignette, his twenty-week guarantee was up and he was released from the film. Since Jackson refused to stay on after Pan left, a young choreographer named Claude Thompson was hired to stage the remaining numbers. Even before Pan had been released, his work was subverted by Coppola who continually interrupted the choreography with cutaway shots of vignettes that were neither entertaining nor dramatically effective. The director had no choreographic training or experience and staged musical numbers based on concepts that often had no relationship to the sound of the music or the sense of the lyrics. For example, he filmed “Something Sort of Grandish” on a hill with Petula Clark hanging white bed sheets on a clothesline and conceptualized “If This Isn’t Love” as a series of children’s games. The director’s method of staging was little more than playing the music for a dance routine and telling the actors to “move with

The next week, Finian’s Rainbow began a twelve-week filming schedule. Jerry Jackson recalled that when Coppola was unhappy with Pan’s choreography he would ask him (Jackson) to change it rather than approach Pan directly—so poor was the working relationship between director and choreographer. Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise suggest that the tension between them may have had less to do with Pan’s work and more to do with the challenge he presented to Coppola’s authority: “Coppola described Pan as ‘a disaster.’ That probably means that Pan disagreed with him or insisted that the camera serve the choreography, not vice versa, or asked for more rehearsal time for the numbers” (Goodwin 1989, 79). After the filming of “That Great Come-and-Get-It Day” in which Pan makes his final on-screen appearance shining shoes in a barbershop vignette, his twenty-week guarantee was up and he was released from the film. Since Jackson refused to stay on after Pan left, a young choreographer named Claude Thompson was hired to stage the remaining numbers. Even before Pan had been released, his work was subverted by Coppola who continually interrupted the choreography with cutaway shots of vignettes that were neither entertaining nor dramatically effective. The director had no choreographic training or experience and staged musical numbers based on concepts that often had no relationship to the sound of the music or the sense of the lyrics. For example, he filmed “Something Sort of Grandish” on a hill with Petula Clark hanging white bed sheets on a clothesline and conceptualized “If This Isn’t