SEEING AROUND CORNERS

Investment banker Whalen offers the life story and professional wisdom of a successful New Jersey businessman in this biography.

Whalen describes Stanley Middleman, founder of the national mortgage banking company Freedom Mortgage, as “one of the largest and fastest-growing independent mortgage companies in the country.” In this biography, the author follows his subject from the earliest days of his working life, frantically working multiple jobs while putting himself through school. He got his first real break—and his first deep insight into the business principles that would later guide his career—when he was working in Philadelphia, selling patriotic souvenirs to tourists during the 1976 Bicentennial. While he was still a young man, he began a career in finance, selling annuities amid the “sky-high interest rates” of the mid-1980s. In the ’90s, he founded his signature company, Freedom Mortgage, in a real estate market that was still reeling from the inflation-fighting interest rates of the ’70s—indeed, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker is often portrayed as a kind of villain in these pages. Along the way, Middleman conceived a handful of familiar professional precepts, including “Every Idea Starts with You,” and “Then Things Change.” He used these principles in order to, as he put it, “see around corners,” which he describes as the ability to “predict or gain insights on the future based on our past experiences.” Some readers may think, however, that this titular notion seems to conflict with the unpredictability of “Then Things Change”—and also with how nimble Middleman was in the face of unexpected developments over the course of his own career. As such, readers may find the self-help aspects of this work to be somewhat uneven. Even so, Whalen’s biography is an engaging case study of the benefits of hard work and discipline. However, readers may reasonably wonder if a first-person remembrance by Middleman himself might not have been more entertaining and insightful.

A personal and readable account of a mortgage-company founder who made it big.