Timing or Talent?

I'm recently reading many finance-related books. The more I read, the stronger I felt that professionals in finance field are more betting on the timing. People could get all kinds of opportunities at the time of innovation and heavy capital flows, even though they were from different backgrounds.

This book tells us author's journey at University, Federal Reserve and CIBC. However, the focus is more on the introduction on federal reserve's services and the procedures. She has splendid experience, and I felt proud of her through the way of reading the book. However, she is not a good author due to long listing and no real focus. Instead of sharing the story, she lists many risks and the documentary stuff. All those interesting cases are barely mentioned.

Some new knowledge I learnt from this novel:
1. in the lat 90s, there were so many merges in terms of bank restructures. For example, Bank of America and First Nation and Fleet Boston; Morgan Stanley and Chase and Bank One
2. Sandy Weill, CEO of Citi, acquires not only Travelers but Smith Barney and Salomon Brothers. One cute thing was that when he called Robert Rubin, Robert's first reaction is "are you buying the government"
3. Financial system was highly impacted by the policy. In terms of the war between OCC and Federal Reserve, OCC is a administration department, which is impacted by the eight-year political leadership transition, while Federal reserve is controlled by Congress with 14-year stability.
4. Salomon's CEO: John Meriwether
5. The importance of self-fulfilling prophecy - lender of the last resort
6. Carpe Diem: we need to finish what we need to finish today. There is no tomorrow available for us!!!
7.Six degrees of Separation:in this society, any two strangers need only six people to build connections. In Toronto or Manhattan or other prosperous cities, maybe only 2 or 3 people are needed.
8. people have to keep and improve their talent in order to survive anywhere in the world.

Overall, this book indicates many of the key concepts related to the risk assessment strategies used by Federal Reserve. However, maybe due to the reasons of security or other stuff, author didn't mention to many special cases that are very private.