The Force of Human Nature in the Context of Power and Money

Years ago I was working in London and met with the chairman of a large bank. He was well into his seventies. We talked off the record, and he told me about a problem the bank couldn’t seem to solve.

They would promote a man in his forties or fifties to CEO, head of sales, or another job at the top of the bank. More money. More authority.

Then came a sexual relationship and then a scandal. Now the bank had a problem of its own: reputational damage, financial exposure, cultural harm.

He said other major London banks were seeing this problem so often that they asked a London university to study the pattern.

Three things rose together, he said.

The man’s sexual appetite went up after the promotion. The interest he received from women went up. And, phones, surveillance and electronic records everywhere, so did the probability the secret relationship would become public and create risk for the bank.

He talked about the three curves as if he were looking at a market chart. Desire, Opportunity, Discovery all went straight up together at the same time.

The recommendation to protect the banks and stop the problem was severe. Stop the first flirtation. Once it began, he said, the bank’s chances of stopping what followed fell away fast.

The only reliable intervention was at the beginning. This wasn’t a theory about virtue. It was a risk calculation made by people who had watched the same thing happen over and over.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s former CEO is just the latest example.

The damage in this case is hundreds of billions in shareholder value.

The bank rule wasn’t a cure for human nature. It recognized it. Stop before an executive’s personal desire becomes an exercise of institutional power. Or be upfront with shareholders about personal expectations in the manner of Elon Musk.

We keep treating these episodes as revelations about the character of one man. I think they reveal something more basic: power and money amplify human desire, and no contract or corporate slogan can wish that away.