Leadership - A discussion of traits, characteristics, and current news of leaders.

A few weeks ago I was in New York and besides some business meetings and sightseeing, I made sure that I visited my good friend Ted Moran.

Ted is a fixed-income trader at a prominent investment bank. I met Ted in the fall of 1990 when we both started as investment banking associates at Kidder Peabody.

Despite being on separate sides of the country for the past 10+ years, Ted and I have remained friends and kept in touch. I guess it is hard to break the bond forged from working alongside someone 14 hours a day.

When I think of character traits that make great leaders, I think of Ted. Maybe that is why I stay in touch with him. He inspires me to be better. He isn’t my boss. He isn’t family. I don’t “have” to look to him, but when I am around Ted, I want to work harder, appreciate family more, be more patriotic. And I also learn a lot about U.S. military history.  I have never met anyone that was not a history professor that knew more about US. Military than Ted.

Ted retold to me his experiences in New York on September 11, 2001 and those friends and associates he lost at Cantor Fitzgerald and those in the FDNY and NYPD. In the early 90s I used to walk through the World Trade Center daily to go to work. It was a sad reminder of the tragedy and inspiring as well.

I tried to tell Ted what I do for a living these days. I told him about Know More Media and a little about the transformation of media. Don’t get me wrong, Ted is super intelligent with degrees from Yale and Columbia to his credit but blogging isn’t mainstream yet and he has three monitors across his desk flowing him business and market data. So this is it Ted. Blogging is about citizen journalism. Know More Media is about providing niche business content unlike any other media.

Oh yeah and check Ted and me circa 1991 after an unprecedented victory in the annual "Have, Have Nots” football game that pitted those at Kidder Peabody that had doorknobs against those at Kidder Peabody that did not (Ted and I). Can you find us 15 years later?