In This Time, In This Place
Geez, it is crazy how things work out…
Geez, it is crazy how small the world really is…
Geez, it is wild where this life has taken me.
Many moons ago, in January 1998, I trekked to Newark, (Don’t Call Me ‘New Jersey’) Delaware, to pitch a marketing search to the fine folks at the credit card company MBNA.
I pitched hard, but my pitch was well out of the strike zone. I did not get hired.
I cannot remember what my exact reaction was to losing that search… I don’t recall crying, gnashing my teeth, or tearing my clothes off like those folks do in the Old Testament when they lost a pitch (or a loved one)…
Those were frothy times in the executive search business, in the midst of the dot com boom, and I was too busy responding to other new business opportunities to do too much mourning.
But in any event, I was impressed by the hiring manager at MBNA to whom we were trying to sell our services. He was really sharp. I wish I could have worked with him!
Fast forward to May of 1998. I was hired to do two new searches.
The first was to find a head of operations for a specialty insurance company in Atlanta, American Security Group.
The second search was a double top-secret assignment in the credit card industry.
Morgan Stanley CEO Phil Purcell hired us to do a confidential search to find a president to lead a turnaround of Discover Card, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Morgan Stanley.
Two weeks later I am in New York, in Purcell’s office, to review a list of 20 potential prospects for the President role at Discover. He asks me to force rank the names – who would I say are the top three?
“I really like this Senior Executive Vice President at MBNA, David Nelms.” I reply.
David Nelms was the guy who had NOT hired me to do the marketing search at MBNA.
You cannot do any navel-gazing in the executive search business. First off, that is a disgusting metaphor, and secondly, if you do gaze at your navel, you won’t see every other project on which you are working come off track.
So, while Phil Purcell was in hot pursuit of David Nelms, I am trying to nail down an exceptionally talented tech and ops guy out of Citigroup, John Owen, for the head of operations role at American Security Group.
So, what happens in July of 1998?
David Nelms was named President of Discover Card, and
John Owen was named Senior Vice President of Operations of American Security Group.
So what, no big deal… Two guys take new jobs, one in Riverwoods, Illinois, the other in Atlanta, Georgia, respectively, at the urging of some plucky headhunter by the name of Rich Perkey.
This ain’t nothing noteworthy!
Except for the following:
David Nelms had an incredible 20-year run at Discover Financial, taking on the CEO role of Discover when it spun out of Morgan Stanley in 2007. Discover had a market cap of $26.0 billion when David turned over the reins to his successor in 2019.
John Owen rose to be one of the senior leaders of Assurant Group, the successor company to American Security Group before he left to run retail banking at Regions Bank in Birmingham, Alabama – one month after Discover Financial went public with Nelms at the helm.
In 2006, David Nelms’ 6’9” son, Dan was awarded a basketball scholarship to join the Davidson College Wildcats, along with a skinny 6’1” point guard out of Charlotte, North Carolina by the name of Stephen Curry.
Steph Curry went on to break the career scoring mark at Davidson College previously held by my Wildcat teammate, John Gerdy. (Please note – Steph broke my career scoring mark of 103 points in his fifth game as a Wildcat.)
In June of 2007, the CFO and Chief Administrative Officer for Constellation Energy in Baltimore, Follin Smith, became an independent director of Discover Financial, where David Nelms was CEO. Follin was married to John Gerdy.
In my attempt to keep up with David Nelms, my 6’7” son, Connor, played basketball at Davidson from 2012 to 2017.
Three years after David Nelms retired, John Owen was named an independent director of Discover Financial. John served as interim CEO of Discover in 2023, while the company searched for a successor to Roger Hochschild, who had succeeded… David Nelms.
So, when Capital One announced on Monday, February 19th that it was buying Discover Financial for $35.0 billion, I smiled a bit, and thought about how, of the 108,000,000 humans that have lived on this earth in its 4.5 billion years of existence, there are but a few of us whose journeys have intersected in such a unique way, at this time, in this place.
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