Where the Capital Fluency Methodology Comes From
This is Part 2 of a three-part series on Capital Fluency, the operating discipline that lets owner-operators run capital, not just read about it. Part 1 sets the term and the distinction from financial literacy. Part 2 (this one) is about where the methodology comes from.
From Dartmouth to Bank of Boston
Most coaching methodologies are adapted from other coaching methodologies. The methodology I teach is adapted from something more useful. It is adapted from how I was trained to teach languages.
I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College. Dartmouth takes total immersion language instruction seriously. The father of that methodology, Prof. John Rassias, was on the faculty when I was there. He was a former Marine who fought in the Pacific in WWII, and he ran the language program with the intensity and discipline that comes with that experience. He was also an incredible thespian who had a gift for genuine cultural exchange. He dedicated his life to having language unlock those wonders. He liked to call us his lieutenants. I was one of them.
What total immersion meant in practice was that for one hour every working day of the week, the people I was responsible for would not speak English. I was trained to lead “drill sessions.” We would not speak to participants in English. We immersed them. That hour-long drill was supplemented by language laboratory work and by structured classroom instruction. Somehow, we kept it all fun, and then we would put learners on a plane.
The Dartmouth foreign study abroad sites were hand-picked to be isolated. I, for example, went to a small town in France where nobody spoke any English at all. But I was hooked. The methodology continued at the site. After Dartmouth, I went on to Middlebury College for a master’s degree in the same total immersion tradition. Middlebury is even stricter. They tell you when to show up, police you so you can’t speak English, and then they expected those of us enrolled in overseas study to figure out everything else for ourselves. You go register, you find a place to live, you figure out how to eat, you do it in the language, totally immersed. The language is, at that point, no longer optional. The language is survival.
Total immersion works because it is true to how humans actually acquire languages. You do not learn a language by accumulating knowledge about it. You learn it by being unable to escape it. You ingest it. You become it. You find your personal expression inside what the language provides, and somewhere in that process, the language becomes yours.
When I joined the training program at the First National Bank of Boston, despite not being a business school person, I recognized what I had walked into. Bank of Boston, in those years, ran a highly competitive, industry-recognized corporate finance and lending training program. It was a year and a half of classroom and heavily mentored analytical work before the bank would allow us on field rotations. After rotations, if you were approved (survived), you were assigned to a division, managed by people whose bonus depended on you not screwing up, given $1MM of credit authority, a stack of promissory notes, a pat on the back, and instructions to go make good loans.
I was assigned to the Foreign Multinational Lending Division. We funded the senior debt portion of corporate expansions and leveraged buyouts for non-US multinational corporations, some very large, some middle market. All of them were either entering, already in, or expanding further inside the US market. We also financed their deals outside the US. The work, by its very broad-based, multidisciplinary nature, demanded total capital fluency because capital was the work. You could not do the job if you had not learned to speak the language with innate reflex, not just with vocabulary.
The trainers were heavy hitters. They were the people who had saved The Empire Strikes Back when its original financing collapsed mid-production, the people who had opened the insurance industry to certain kinds of lending, the people who had pioneered structuring swaps and collars and floors and ceilings as instruments. In my case, they were (yes, more former Marines), perennial expats, and people who had run entire operations overseas, or whose families had run countries. They were the legends. Not always the easiest folk, but professionals who genuinely understood the game, and if us young’ins were tone deaf to reality or able to sing on pitch.
That was a total immersion environment for finance. For me, as a Dartmouth and Middlebury-trained language instructor, the architecture was very familiar, even if it was dressed up in a financy way.
The methodology I use is a blending of these experiences. The pedagogy is total immersion language instruction. The content is the language of capital. I understand that the two were not designed to fit together. They fit together for the people I work with and me because the underlying truth is the same. You do not learn capital by sitting in an accounting class on a Sunday afternoon. You learn capital by being unable to escape it inside your own business, with someone in the room who can hold the standard.
