On Friday, September 29, came the news that the risibly named Financial Stability Oversight Council had voted overwhelmingly to rescind AIG’s designation as a “systemically important financial institution” – that is, that the government in its wisdom no longer regards the company as a threat to the broader economy.

I wish Bob Benmosche could have seen this. Indeed, I choose to believe he did.

Bob Benmosche was and remains the only genuine hero to emerge from the great financial crisis of 2007-09. He took the helm of the most hated and reviled corporate entity of the day (recipient, in one form and another, of a hitherto unimaginable $182 billion in taxpayer bailout funds); led rather than managed it back to the forefront of American financial institutions; and paid back every cent of taxpayer money, along with a significant profit. What renders this story heroic is that, from the very first day of Bob’s tenure as CEO of AIG, he was the only person on earth who genuinely believed that all this could – and indeed should – be accomplished.

What Bob saw – what no one else cared to see amid the howls of execration and even physical threats to the company’s employees and their families – was that all the damage had emanated from one enterprise: the ill-fated Financial Products unit, tucked away in Wilton, Connecticut. There, a mere 440 of AIG’s 100,000 employees had been insuring (through the medium of credit default swaps) mountains of subprime mortgage debt. That is, they had backed AAA-rated bundles of mortgages with AIG’s own AAA credit rating – charging pennies to insure a risk that was held to be nonexistent, and that therefore proved to be illimitable.

Bob Benmosche came in with the express purpose of shoring up the morale of the other 99,000-plus AIG employees, getting them back to work at their hitherto profitable businesses, selling off some major but nonstrategic divisions over time, and only at the right prices, and buying the company back from the taxpayers.

That Bob triumphed, and how he did so, is the story in his sadly posthumous memoir Good For The Money: My Fight to Pay Back America. That even as he was conducting his seemingly impossible campaign Bob was stricken with terminal cancer is its tragedy. And it is what lends Bob’s saga its ultimate heroism. He died on February 27, 2015, five years after he was given a year to live.

This is a book that every advisor must read – especially those who lead teams. Because more than any six books on leadership I’ve ever read, Good For The Money is the classic text on the subject.

© 2017 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Nick reviews current books, articles and research findings for advisors in his monthly newsletter, Nick Murray Interactive. His most recent book is Around the Year with Nick Murray.