Morning Coffee: The horrible schedule you need to work to rescue a buy-side firm. Top former banker thinks her former ESG job was monstrous

efinancialcareers.com:

Unfortunately for everyone in the industry, it takes an awful lot more work to recover a damaged franchise than it does to keep a functioning company going. So when a financial firm gets into as much trouble as Janus Henderson did after what was famously one of the worst mergers in fund management history, there were bound to be some blood sweat and tears involved for Ali Dibadj the CEO who was brought in two years ago to try to turn things around.

And there seem to have been all three, in large quantities. He currently works on a four-week cycle with one week in London, one week in Denver at the other Janus hub, one week in New York (where his family live) and then one week visiting some of the other global offices. His working day begins at 7:30 am, with back-to-back meetings “until 8pm if it’s New York and 11pm in other locations”, and he eats a salad for lunch and Pret a Manger for dinner. If there was an objective standard definition of “nice work if you can get it”, this would be its antonym.

What kind of a person could possibly live like this? A minute’s thought suggests one possibility from the banking industry, which is “a former top-rated sell side analyst”. He used to lead the Institutional Investor ranked consumer goods research team at AllianceBernstein, then moved up the ranks to become CFO and Head of Strategy . That’s likely to be where he learned the work ethic that causes colleagues today to admire his client focus and say things like “no one outworks Ali”.

The only bright side appears to be that Dibadj is staying in hotels in places other than New York, perhaps suggesting that he isn’t planning to keep up this schedule long enough to make it worthwhile buying a house in London or Denver. And the