The Bear - Was its sin its independent streak

When Bear Stearns was being attacked on all sides, mostly by stealth forces, it may have been able to save itself.  What it needed was what it didn't have: A network of confidants who had the intelligence which could have revealed which parties were short-selling, which parties were leaking, which were creating false rumors.  According to Bryan Burrough's account of The Bear Mauling in August's VANITY FAIR, the firm didn't have to die.

The Bear didn't have that network, even in a highly interconnected business like financial markets, because it had its independent streak.  That might have been okay in a less globalized financial marketplace.  But it wasn't in the days The Bear fell.  Their inward-looking ways were analogous to a family's being aloof in an East Side tenement back in the 1920s.  That's downright impossible.  There were too many crises that required neighborhood intervention.

The Bear was not alone in treasuring its right to stand away from the pack.  So many of us wanted to be our own business people, at least until the global recession of 2001.  Then we got it how dependent we all are on whatever to even make a buck, never mind thrive in a game that's globalized and totally technology-driven.

The Bear's collapse reinforces the tough lessons we learned at the turn of the century.  We all need friends, in bad times and good.  Nurturing, including pruning dead parts, our networks is job-number-one for my communications boutiques.