The reason you're put in the CEO chair is because a company is facing these issues and you've been designated the person best to organize around them. I think that people are pretty energized around trying to figure this out.

Everybody is looking at their base business and saying, "What else is it? Sure, we do this, but while we're doing that, what else do we know about our customer, and what does that enable us to do?" That comes from the access to information and the ability to analyze it with a speed they never had. I think everybody is thinking that way.

I would point out is that most of the change over the past 5,000 years has been arithmetic, and it now logarithmic. Digitization, the whole Moore's law thing where it doubles every 18 months - that is a speed that is faster than most people are used to.

By the way, I'm not sure the managing director who was 50 in 2005 understood that the job had changed - that when he or she came out of school in 1986, that it was different. How would they know? We've got to admit that.

I don't want to pick on Deutsche Bank, but I think the world of the regulated financial conglomerate, it is a strange thing. There is nothing in common between writing checks and running branch offices, issuing credit cards - those are good businesses, but they really have zero in common with M&A advice. They're a different customer.

In most industries, technological change is happening at a rapid rate.

We're a small part of this ecosystem. When we go to a school and talk about investment banking, they are these monster financial conglomerates, and so we end up in the same pot. That is still an issue for us.