The Stock

Introduction to the Wall Street Saga

I will never forget the day I entered boarding school.

It was October 15, 1970. A Thursday.

For the occasion, my father was there. He had asked Gillette for an afternoon off, something that rarely happened. Looking back, I realize that he was not simply accompanying a child to school. He was delivering a small piece of the Gillette story into a world that neither of us could yet understand.

A young nun named Sister Giuseppina came to meet me.

Fair skin, blue eyes, youthful face. The veil concealed everything else. She took me by the hand and escorted me to Class 1A, where my teacher, Sister Dominella, was waiting.

Sister Dominella was already old.

She constantly rubbed her knees and predicted rain with remarkable confidence. According to her, the weather lived inside her joints. If her knees hurt, clouds were coming.

When I entered the classroom, she already knew my name. In fact, everybody did. News traveled quickly inside those walls. The tributes had arrived before I had.

Every room contained the same gift: simple plastic bags carrying the red Gillette logo of the 1970s, decorated only with pictures of razor blades.

I was too young to understand it, but I had already become a small ambassador for a company that would follow me throughout my life.

The first lesson was about action. Good actions.

At six years old, that seemed simple enough. The good action was good. The bad action was bad. Case closed.

But life, as always, had other plans.

A few years later I discovered that actions are never judged by what they are. They are judged by the stories surrounding them.

Give someone a candy and it becomes a good deed. Use the same candy for a different purpose and suddenly it becomes a bad one. The action remains unchanged. Only the narrative changes.

That was the first real lesson of my life. Not morality. Not religion. Not discipline. Narrative. The strange power that transforms identical facts into opposite meanings.

Decades later, Gillette would bring me to Boston. Together with colleagues from around the world, I would eventually stand in the financial capital that children in boarding schools never dream about: New York.

Even near Wall Street itself.

But that is another story. It has already been written elsewhere, and I have never enjoyed repeating myself merely to fill literary space.

Still, there is one thought that remains.

People are always remembered for their actions. Some actions become stories. Some stories become history.

And if those actions happen to be written on paper, traded, valued, bought, sold, and quoted every day… who the hell is ever going to forget them?