CEO Speaks: Making Peace

He was a Wall Street upstart from Brooklyn 50 years ago. Since then, Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill got rich and famous building an empire that culminated with the Travelers-Citicorp merger in 1998. In the process he walked away once and busted up with friends like Jamie Dimon. Weill, 73, has written The Real Deal, on his dealmaking and how things could have gone smoother. He spoke with TIME's BILL SAPORITO about mending fences, how to keep marriages strong and his focus on philanthropy.

There's been a lot written about you. Is this new book a chance to even the score?

Over time, I've rationalized what happened in a lot of different events, and it turned out, in my rationalization, that most of the time I was right. I knew that that was never the case, so I went and got a collaborator who was very well briefed and knowledgeable about the banking and financial world--the No. 1 analyst at Merrill Lynch--and he spent time interviewing everybody whose name is in the book. These were people whom I was mentoring like [Shearson's] Peter Cohen or [Citigroup's] Jamie Dimon; or John Reed, after we did our merger. One of the interesting things in spending two years working on a book is that it is a little cathartic. People whom I had grudges about--I felt that it's enough time and life is too short. Most of these people have been successful in other careers, and that's a good thing. Maybe it's time to renew our friendship.

So have you learned a better way to part with people or fire them?

I've never been very good at firing people. I've been always very loyal to people, and loyal to a fault when somebody was starting to do the wrong things. I just let those people be in the company way too long, until the problem became bigger. I always liked somebody else to do the actual firing or letting go or having that difficult conversation, which I was never quite up to. I think the one time I actually did do it myself was when John [Reed, his co-CEO at Citi] and I decided to tell Jamie [Dimon, a Citi president and his longtime protégé] that this was not working out. I felt that I had enough of a relationship with Jamie that I should be the one who tells him, which I did. But it was not easy.

The Citicorp and Travelers Group merger worked financially, but there were problems with top management and between you and John Reed. What happened?

People have different strengths and weaknesses, and my strength was not the ability to confront people. My strength was much more in the ability to evaluate where business was going, and getting it to grow by encouraging all the people in the company to make the decision pretty fast about who should stay and who should go. Because when you don't make those decisions, nobody knows better that you're not making the sensible decision fast enough than the people who are working in the company.

Has Citigroup got too big?

It's not even close to being too big, is my personal point of view. Our market share in a lot of the growth markets for financial services around the world may be 3% or 4%. It can be a multiple of that.

You're a numbers guy, but you used to pal around with Johnny Carson and Muhammad Ali.

When I got married 51 years ago, I was a very shy person and my wife was more outgoing. She used to push me at night to make the sales calls, to speak to people--The kids gotta eat.