“Wall Street is a very Darwinian place,” Scott Bok said on this week’s Drinks With The Deal podcast, where he discussed his long tenure as chairman and CEO of Greenhill & Co. and his new memoir, “Surviving Wall Street: A Tale of Triumph, Tragedy and Timing.”

“The show, which was made into a movie, that I thought encapsulated that best was ‘Glengarry Glen Ross,’ the David Mamet play where they have a sales contest,” said Bok, an avid theatergoer. “It’s a brutal situation between three or four people. The winner gets a new Cadillac, and if you finish in second place, you get a set of steak knives, and third place means you’re fired. I always thought that was a great metaphor for Wall Street.”

Managing in such an environment is challenging, Bok said. “As a leader, as a CEO, you end up having to help a lot of people deal with the fact that if they rose in their career to get the Cadillac, they’re not going to get the Cadillac forever. At some point in their career, they’re going to slow down, they’re going to get older, they’re going to be less valuable, they’re going to need to retire. Or maybe they’re never going to get the Cadillac. People on Wall Street are very ambitious, very competitive, but very few people make it to the top. The nature of very ambitious people is that there is going to be a lot of disappointment ultimately in their careers.”

And, he said, that’s especially true for senior bankers. “A lot of men struggle with how to deal with the end of their career. ‘Am I still going to be relevant? Am I still going to have a reason to get up in the morning?’ As a CEO, you end up having to manage people through those difficult transitions.”

Listen to the podcast with Scott Bok below:

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