From: empower@smart.net
Subject: "Stock Analyst Relies on Insight to Combat Failing Eyesight"
Here we go with the superblink stereotype ...
Jamal
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from http://www.nytimes.com
"Stock Analyst Relies on Insight to Combat Failing Eyesight

By ADAM BRYANT
INNEAPOLIS -- By the time he was 34, Paul Karos had achieved
remarkable success on Wall Street. He was the top-rated airline analyst
four years running, a partner at CS First Boston, and governments around
the world were asking his advice on aviation matters.
What made his achievements particularly remarkable, though, was that he
could barely see. From an early age, a degenerative eye disease called
retinitis pigmentosa had slowly robbed him of sight. But Karos was
determined not to let his handicap show to most people, particularly new
clients. Using powerful magnifiers to read, he drilled data and
presentations into his head so that he could always talk from memory. In
meetings at restaurants, Karos always ordered the specials rather than ask
for help with the menu.
"I'm not a picky eater," he said.
Karos is, of course, not the first person to compensate for a handicap
through hard work. But what makes his life even more unusual is that after
all the effort to succeed in the sharp-elbowed world of Wall Street Karos
quit New York to return to his hometown of Minneapolis, ultimately for a
lower-paying but more satisfying job. He rejoined Piper Jaffray, the
regional brokerage firm that gave him his first job in the securities
business, returning as its head of institutional sales.
Karos is now finding that his onetime weakness is actually an advantage in
that most subtle and difficult of workplace arts -- managing people. In a
business where how much money you make is often the only yardstick, Karos
is measuring success differently now.
"I love seeing my people win and enjoy what they do," he said. "I no longer
need to be the star."
As a child and young teen-ager, though, Karos never dreamed he would have a
chance to become a star. His parents first suspected that something was
wrong when they asked him to pass the television channel changer at the
foot of their bed. As Paul groped for it unsuccessfully, they thought he
was teasing them. After a number of tests, doctors diagnosed the disease.
He was 8 years old.
Retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that afflicts about 100,000 Americans, can
darken a person's vision over a few years or over a period of decades. In
almost all cases, total blindness is inevitable. At first, seeing at night
is difficult. Then the field of vision narrows to a dark tunnel. Today, the
print in this article is too small for Karos to read. Faces are little more
than blurred silhouettes.
"The difficult part of this disease is that you accept it to a certain
point," he said, "and then your sight grows worse."
For years, he felt angry. He could no longer play hockey with his brothers.
He worried all the time that his teachers would call on him.
"I was ashamed of feeling like I was different," he said. "I was always
scared to death of people finding out about my sight."
But when he was 15, Karos said, he stopped feeling sorry for himself. He
had spent some time with other visually impaired youngsters at weekend
camps. Some of his neighborhood friends said that watching him deal with
his situation made their own problems seem less important. "Everybody has
something to deal with," Karos recalls telling himself.
He resolved to prove to himself and to others that his poor vision would
not slow him down.
He had never thought of doing anything other than following his father into
the securities business. In June 1981, at the end of his first year at the
University of Minnesota, he asked for a job at Piper Jaffray, where his
father was in charge of over-the-counter trading. Piper's agribusiness
analyst needed somebody to type commodity numbers into a computer program,
and Karos said that he was confident that he could do that very well.
At the time, most analysts at Piper and elsewhere did their forecasts on
long handwritten spreadsheets. But a relatively new computer program called
Visicalc had just shown up at the office. Most analysts were not really
interested in learning more about it, but Karos decided to slowly work
through the manual late into the night.
"I knew this was going to be something big," he said.
Though still a college student, Karos was soon working 30 hours a week at
Piper, teaching analysts how to use the spreadsheet program. He, in turn,
learned from them, and developed a forecasting model that many Piper
analysts still use today.
When he graduated with a finance degree, Piper Jaffray immediately offered
Karos a full-time job working with its airline analyst, who was planning to
change industries soon. Karos took over, and shortly after, he advised
clients that the shares of Northwest Airlines were undervalued because of
exaggerated concerns about service problems after its merger with Republic
Airlines. It turned out to be a great call, and Karos' name started
circulating on Wall Street.
In 1986, at the age of 24, he moved to New York to join L.F. Rothschild as
its airline analyst. His pay jumped from $24,000 to $130,000. It jumped
even further two years later, when he joined First Boston.
Karos said that his drive made him a workaholic, and he loved the nonstop
life of an analyst. He once traveled to 24 cities in two months, sometimes
visiting three cities in one day for meetings. He counseled aviation
officials around the world. Because he constantly had to memorize his
material, he appeared to clients to be firmly in command of his knowledge
of the industry. From 1992 to 1995, he was voted the top airline analyst in
the annual Institutional Investor survey. Bonuses rolled in.
But something was nagging at him. "The only thing to do from there was to
make more money," he said. He missed his family and friends, so First
Boston set up a one-man office in Minneapolis for him. Even so, the pace of
travel did not slow down.
In the summer of 1995, it all caught up with him. He was in Amsterdam, the
fourth city in four countries in four days, and had checked into his room
at the plush Hotel de L'Europe. He unexpectedly burst into tears. "Lord,
what am I doing?" he asked aloud. The cumulative stress of navigating his
way through crowds at unfamiliar airports, staying in strange hotel rooms
(including one where he broke his nose running into an armoire), the
pressure to be right on every stock call as the No. 1 analyst, was all too
much.
"I made up my mind that it was not something I wanted to do anymore," he
said. He soon informed First Boston that he was leaving, and told his
bosses that no amount of money could persuade him to stay. He received five
offers from firms in New York and Minneapolis, but decided to return to
Piper.
Addison L. Piper, the firm's chairman, played no small role in that
decision. After Karos left Piper in 1986, Piper kept in touch, occasionally
dropping him a note, saying how proud he was of Karos' accomplishments and
reminding him of where he started. When Karos quit First Boston, Piper took
him out to lunch to continue his none-too-subtle persuasion. "You know
where you're coming back to, don't you?" Piper recalled asking him.
Before he went back to work, Karos took three months off. He slept a lot,
worked out, and planned his wedding to Cindy Zaine, whom he had met through
a mutual friend. When his parents decided to move to Florida, he bought the
modest house he grew up in, which he and his wife, now pregnant, plan to
fill with children.
"We may never move from there," he said. "A big house is not something
that's important to us."
In his new job, he runs the 7 a.m. meeting with 80 analysts, sales
representatives and traders, and works alongside the director of research
to plan and shape the firm's best recommendations of the day for its
institutional clients.
He has added a lot more structure to the operation, and formed a number of
task forces. He has drawn up individual business plans for his 33 sales
representatives, reviews their progress every six months and sets
ever-tougher sales targets.
He puts his sensitive antennae to work at every opportunity. After analysts
give their morning presentations, he often says to his staff that he is
sensing more or less conviction in their voice than in the past when
discussing a particular stock.
All the changes have paid off. In the year he has been there, Piper's
ratings have jumped sharply in independent surveys of institutional
clients.
Some of his management techniques are unusual. When Karos gives performance
reviews, he asks his employees to read them aloud during their meeting.
"It's not a normal things to do, but it creates a relationship with them,"
he said. "And I learn how comfortable they are talking about their
strengths and weaknesses."
His staff said that Karos usually knows when something is bothering them,
and that he will often push to find out what it is. In an industry where
pessimism and complaints about money are not uncommon, Karos counsels his
employees to stay focused on their plan, and reminds them how much more
they earn than most people outside their industry.
"Paul has a sixth sense," said Jodi D. Peterson, who has worked in
institutional sales at Piper for six years. "He can sense what you're
thinking, and that's not all that typical, particularly in this business."
He often wanders out on the trading floor. "I love being out where the
action is," he said. "It's good and loud, and there's a lot of energy."
Or he will walk over to joke with his brother Nick, who took over their
father's job as head of over-the-counter trading at Piper. Nick is still
looking out for his little brother -- he taped a folded tissue over a sharp
corner on his desk that Paul kept hitting.
Karos acknowledges that visits to the trading floor from his nearby office
are not always the smoothest ventures. He sometimes trips, bumps into
things and occasionally knocks them over. But he says he never feels
ashamed anymore, and keeps walking, booming out the nicknames of traders
and members of his staff as he passes their desks.
"Nothing ever fazes him," said James R. Kanellitsas, one of the top sales
representatives working for Karos. "He keeps things in perspective for all
of us."
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