What Happened to Survival Instincts?

Doug Wallace is an attorney and author of the memoir Everything Will Be All Right. As an attorney, Wallace represented many of the nation's largest banks throughout the 80's and 90's. Wallace offers insight into the collapse of the financial system, from the perspective of person who clawed his way out of poverty.

Whenever Wallace thinks about the fact that Wall Street collapsed overnight, he can't help but wonder, "How could this happen? Anyone can make a mistake at any given point in time, but it defies logic that whole leadership teams throughout an entire industry make the same fatal mistake, all at the same time."

In the past twelve months one-hundred year old institutions with immense wealth, headed by the most educated managers our society has to offer, the Ivy League elites, have collapsed under the weight of debt. Says Wallace, "And, what did these eggheads do? They followed each other like lemmings into the sea."

Wallace believes the fatal mistakes were born of hubris. The Ivy League elites couldn't prove their mettle when it came to protecting the assets of our nation's largest banks. They didn't know how to fight for survival, or how to build relationships that guaranteed the protection of assets. To use the street vernacular of his teenage years in the housing projects, Wallace says, "these guys didn't know how to hang with the big boys."

In 1994 Wallace formed an organization called the National Attorney Network (NAN). The purpose of NAN was to link law firms and Fortune 500 companies together into a tight-knit organization that made the whole work better than the sum of the parts. The first challenge was to find a way to get hundreds of independent law firms to work together. At the end of the day, NAN was a huge success when,as CEO, Wallace merged NAN with Synovus in 1999, but that success didn't happen without a fight.

A Senior VP at Ford Motor Credit Company, in an effort to be helpful, warned Wallace that the kind of change he was attempting to create with NAN would cause unimaginable trouble. His exact words were, "People will lie, cheat and steal in order to stop you. They will do everything within their power to destroy you. You can expect anything and everything and there will be no rules in this fight." His words reminded Wallace of those teenage years living in the housing projects in east Nashville. "That's exactly how the street gangs behaved," says Wallace.

Wallace points out that living in extreme poverty taught him to watch his back against predators. He couldn't walk the streets without fear of a chance encounter involving a street battle in which there were no rules. Through it all, he acquired a gut instinct for survival. Often that meant forming quick relationships as necessary to overcome unexpected challenges. Wallace had no idea that this experience would be more valuable than an Ivy League education.

Says Wallace, "In a way, there is logic to the madness in this twisted irony. The privileged elites, who got us into this mess, have never had their own survival threatened. So,why should we be surprised when they fail miserably when it comes to guarding against risks, protecting our turf, and fighting off threats against survival?"

Doug Wallace is an attorney, a successful entrepreneur and a published author. His book Everything Will Be All Right is scheduled for nationwide launch on October 1, 2009. Doug chose to write his story of growing up in poverty as a way to call attention to the unimaginable hardships for the generationally impoverished. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders Kindle, Sony Reader, and retail book stores everywhere beginning fall 2009.