Customer Reviews

Back From the Brink: Coping With Stress

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The name 'Nick Leeson' evokes strong emotions in financial circles. The man who was made the primary 'whipping boy' behind the well publicised and record breaking financial scandal leading to the fall of Barings Bank has been ruthlessly reviled and hounded by both the press and the establishment alike. In his first book on the Barings affair, 'Rogue Trader', Nick Leeson gives his own version of the issue, why he acted as he did, and the impulses that drove him to do so. In this book, presented in a conversational format with his psychiatrist and co author Ivan Tyrell, he gives an account of the skills and strategies he developed on the way to deal with the tremendous challenges that he had to face, the grim travails of life behind bars, first in Germany, then in Singapore, the gruelling heat there, his divorce, his colon cancer and of course, being mired in debt.

Reading this book gave me a poignant picture of the fickleness of the values that govern the lives of the high flying financial circles today. We love rags to riches stories, stories of people coming up in life from seemingly unremarkable beginnings, where being a 'regular guy taking a few pegs at the pub' is the done thing to do, irrespective of whether the regular guy drinks too much. However, when the same 'regular guy' fails to deliver, and fails egregiously, then, well that is when all the chickens scatter and come home to roost, leaving the 'fall guy' to face the consequences.

This is exactly what happened to Nick Leeson when he was faced with financial devastation, a crisis of such proportions, that his whole life was turned, upside down and inside out, sparing not one area of his consciousness and spaced out over several years. He faced his momentous loss of control with almost brutal self-honesty and unflappable courage, taking each impulse, each moment of self-destruction, one moment at a time. Not once in this book, not even while acknowledging his and other people's mistakes, does he attempt to justify his own actions at the bank, or discredit those who brought him to his port of incarceration at Tanah Mera in Singapore. This is why his account of the state of affairs at the time of his indictment, is very credible.

During his first confinement in Frankfurt, Germany, he wrote his first book 'Rogue Trader'. While in Singapore, he devoted a lot of time to physical exercise, reading and writing, regularly setting up progressively large targets and keeping them. As mentioned earlier, he lived every moment consciously, choosing life over death when confronted, as is usual in such a place, by strong urges of suicide. Though this book devotes a long portion to the period he lived behind bars, how he coped there, is not the main message of the book. What Nick Leeson intends to convey is that the most daunting odds in Life, the worst stress situations can be handled by honesty and a steadfast faith in one's own capacity to overcome it. The outcome of facing such galling circumstances and coming out of them successfully, gears one to face the oncoming challenges presented by Life with a much greater sang froid. And of course, his story closes with the proverbial happy ending, when he meets the love of his life, Leona and she gives birth to their son, soon afterwards.

Considering the fact that stress situations are endemic in modern society, especially in the business world, dealing with stress and stress related problems is an urgent issue today. Nick Leeson presents his own solution in 'Back from the Brink'.

Incidentally, most of the contents of this book had been written in Singapore, under incarceration. On his departure, Leeson was forced to surrender his writings, which were systematically shredded in what was 'the most galling incident of my life'. That work, was reconstructed as a conversation between Nick Leeson and his psychiatrist, Ivan Tyrell in the pages of this book

It's a great book on stress management. I appreciate Nick's frankness shown throughout the book.