When building a professional adviser relationship, it may be important to know that your adviser’s core values and global views are in alignment with your own. Our experience indicates that this alignment leads to more trusting, long lasting and productive working relationships.
My professional practice, business activities, and personal life are driven with the intent of advancing these core values:
1 – Treating others as I would wish to be treated
I am committed to a daily exercise of “doing unto others as I wish they would do to unto me”. The Golden Rule is the basis of professional ethics standards that incorporate competence, integrity, fairness, diligence, professionalism and confidentiality. All people should be treated with equal respect. I support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the United States adopted in 1948 and modified and reaffirmed since then. For me this often means putting the rights of the weak and disadvantaged on equal footing as those of the rich and powerful. It means resisting nationalism, racism, sexism and tribalism in all its forms. In practice,
2 – Supporting independent small business
Small business are the strongest and most resilient economic force in our society. I strongly oppose the trend of income and wealth concentration within the largest corporations controlled by the wealthiest individuals. This is dangerous and harmful to our society. We are compelled to stop the trend. We must reinvent the concept of corporations. For me this effort to stop the trend means supporting small businesses that help more people boost income and wealth and resisting measures that primarily benefit only the top few. In 1987 I left the most powerful firm on Wall Street firm to gain integrity with this core value and have been committed to working for ordinary business people ever since. While I’ve been privileged to serve some of the country’s wealthiest and most successful people as clients, we are pleased to share this common value.
3 – Freedom of expression and support of diverse ideas within the community
I support diverse businesses and nonprofit organizations including many with beliefs different than my own. This policy of support incorporates a respect for the right to peaceful assembly, freedom of expression and protest within the bounds of acceptable public behaviors that must be upheld even when exercising this right is not convenient and it interferes with efficiency and operations of the majority. I anticipate that free speech, civil protest and nonviolent lawbreaking and its resulting impact in society will be the primary tool used to direct the future of our world toward a better direction than would otherwise be preferred by those of the political and economic elite class.