UBS gained 21 percent over the past six months as of April 16, making it the sixth-best performer on the Bloomberg Europe Banks and Financial Services Index, which tracks 40 companies and increased 4.4 percent in the same period.

Friedman, 42, an American who served as chief financial officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, brought a sense of urgency into the organization, which he compared to an Airbus A380 double-decker plane that had to become more agile.

“I like that he’s very impatient, which is very good for a large organization,” Zeltner said about Friedman. “We cut our investment process to five days from three weeks because someone says, ‘Sorry, I don’t have weeks.’ This is not a buy-and-hold market anymore, I need to trade tomorrow.”

Friedman, who usually works standing up at his desk and wears a Nike FuelBand, which monitors how active he is during the day, says the process he put in place is “fluid” and “thought-through” at the same time, “like the layout of well- designed emergency room in a hospital, organized to minimize costly errors.”

The same day that top client advisers were in Thun, Friedman and Mark Haefele, a former hedge-fund manager now UBS’s head of investment, were preparing for the monthly global investment committee meeting at which decisions affecting the management of $1.7 trillion of assets would be made.

Covered Windows

The two-hour meeting, held in a top-floor room where the windows were fully covered by blinds, marked the culmination of research and discussions involving UBS analysts and investment professionals, quantitative models and billionaire clients. Experts from external asset managers such as Pimco and Fidelity Investments, the second-biggest mutual-fund manager in the U.S., are also consulted as part of the investment process.

“There is always at least one meeting going on somewhere in the world,” Haefele said. “We’re assessing new information, distilling it down, discussing it and then bringing forward the most important elements to the global discussion where we look at overall asset allocation.”

On the agenda that day was the deadlock surrounding efforts to stave off a financial collapse of Cyprus. Friedman doesn’t lead the meetings and talks little to avoid what he describes as groupthink, the behavioral pattern of people agreeing with the decision-maker. Fourteen other people participating in person or by video and conference calls on March 20 from all regions and businesses of UBS, offered their views and anecdotal evidence.

“I’m rather puzzled that the markets are still so good,” Andreas Hoefert, chief economist at UBS wealth management, told the group, adding that he got e-mails from two friends over the weekend asking how the situation in Cyprus might affect their bank accounts. “The market still is of a consensus that this thing will be solved by the end of this week. If it’s delayed beyond that, then it starts really to hit on the sentiment.”

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