![]() ![]() ![]() Until a critical weekend meeting at a Heathrow airport hotel in late 2000, the firm had never even held a partners’ meeting. It is hard to overstate how radical an upheaval incorporation in 2001 was for the partnership group at Cazenove. And that mattered if the firm wanted to be competitive in hiring. No, it didn’t need capital, but the dotcom boom was pushing it into a need to incorporate to at least provide tradeable equity. In Pickering’s telling, the pressure to respond to changes in the industry eventually became impossible even for Cazenove to ignore. The subtext of identity crisis is an appropriate one for Cazenove, which wrestled for decades with the question of how far to follow the zeitgeist and how far to resist it. Time and again Pickering traces the dichotomies: how internal opinions diverged on what Cazenove could or should be, how clients’ views of the firm were often at odds with how its more progressive staff wished to be seen, how UK rivals would fight those staff tooth and nail in contrast with US houses’ confident willingness to tolerate Cazenove’s presence on deals. ![]() But another story, running in parallel with the first, is a tale of corporate identity and how amorphous that can be, shape shifting with the perspective of the viewer. ![]()
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