The Art of Brokerage

I am currently reading Niall Ferguson's biography of the legendary merchant banker Siegmund Warburg.

I came across the passage below which is an excerpt from an interview with Warburg in 1970.

Warburg uses the doctor/patient relationship to describe his thoughts on being a broker. The passage is probably the best description I have ever read regarding the art of brokerage:

“The motives of a doctor are a mixture of altruism – the wish to help others – and of the ambition to do a good job. He hopes to obtain both the inner satisfaction arising from well-accomplished achievements as well as material recognition. On this basis a good doctor should in the first place listen with great attention to the problems and complaints of his patient and try to gain a comprehensive picture of his strong and weak points, looking not only at the patient’s specific ailments but observing the state of the patient as a whole with its physical and psychological ramifications.

A doctor must neither neglect smaller impairments of the health of his patient nor must he despair over the patient’s most critical afflictions nor desert him even on his deathbed. Moreover a good doctor must have the courage to tell the patient unpleasant facts and to oppose the patient when the patient wants to do things which appear to the doctor to be unwise.

Finally, the doctor when looking after his patient should think only how he can give the best care to his patient and should not give any thought to the bill which he will send to the patient afterwards. However, once the doctor has performed a good service, he should not be shy about sending proper bills to those who can afford to pay them. The primary point seems to me always to be the quality of the service and the courage to persist in giving well-considered advice, no matter how unpopular that might be at times.”