Surviving Wall Street portrays the dramatic transformation of the investment banking business in recent decades through the tumultuous saga of one firm (Greenhill & Co., a specialist in mergers and acquisitions) and one man (Scott Bok, the longtime CEO of that firm). Written in the style of an adventure tale, this book is also a “coming of age” story for a naive young man who came to Wall Street and managed to grab a front-row seat for a period of epic change.

Listeners will gain an insider’s perspective on an M&A firm’s journey from start-up to wildly successful first-of-a-kind IPO and later to a sale to a major global bank; numerous crises that rocked Greenhill and all of Wall Street, including the dot-com crash, global financial crisis, and pandemic; how the creation of new firms and mergers or collapses of old ones have driven the evolution and growth of the industry; and the author’s role in a battle for control of the University of Pennsylvania that featured activist shareholder and corporate takeover tactics.