The story at Morgan Stanley goes like this: Gary Cohn, then president of arch-rival Goldman Sachs, boasted he wanted to crush Morgan Stanley like a cockroach.

When Ted Pick heard that, he erupted. In one of his signature blue-streaked tirades, he ordered troops on his Morgan Stanley trading floor to stick it to Goldman.

That episode might seem like a footnote in the long rivalry between those two storied firms, but for Pick, it now looks like something more.

At 52, he’s in the running for the top job at Morgan Stanley, while Cohn, 60, has receded into the business background after his stint in the Trump White House.

Blunt and almost gleefully profane in years past, Pick has helped Morgan Stanley’s investment bank go toe to toe with its nemesis. In Goldman Sachs v. Morgan Stanley—the Harvard-Yale Game of Wall Street, and the industry’s most enduring rivalry—Pick’s firm is no longer the underdog. The very markets in which the pair compete value Morgan Stanley about $37 billion more, or 28% higher, than Goldman.

Pick’s rise is an unlikely arc for a man who was the last person hired into his analyst class three decades ago. He was immediately assigned to a cramped, rank-smelling room with a datafeed machine. After that came a circuitous climb through the bank’s Wall Street businesses, from the world of hot tech IPOs like Google’s to the rough-and-tumble trading floor. Then last month, Morgan Stanley elevated him to co-president, putting Pick one spot away from potentially becoming chief executive officer.

As he’s moved into the top ranks, he’s had to ground his flying f-bombs.

“If we were full of s---, he told us we were full of s--- and we loved that,” said Tony James, vice chairman at investing giant Blackstone Group Inc., which Pick helped take public. “Back in the old days, he was a trader and spoke that lingo. Over the years, he’s become much more of a polished presenter.”

Pick was the reason Blackstone tapped Morgan Stanley to lead the initial public offering in 2007, said James. He illustrated that point by describing how he invited Pick to join a fly-fishing expedition after the deal, flying to the jungles of Brazil in pursuit of the famed peacock bass.

Much of the group was filled with hardcore anglers wearing special gear while Pick, armed with a last-minute lesson at New York’s Central Park, showed up on the boat in the Amazon decked out in leather loafers.

“You’ve never seen anyone throw their whole body into the cast like Ted Pick,” James said.

This description of Pick’s journey at the bank is based on conversations with colleagues and associates. A representative for Morgan Stanley declined to comment. When asked about the lore at Morgan Stanley, a spokesperson for Cohn said he would’ve referred to them as healthy competition that isn’t going away, in an effort to motivate his own team.

Shrinking Office
Pick spent most of his early stint as a capital-markets banker, helping companies raise money by selling stock. But that changed after the 2008 financial crisis.

He was thrust into leading the equities unit at a time when the bank was hemorrhaging clients and rivals were openly disparaging its viability. Under Pick, the unit went from hobbled to healthy, and it soon charged past competitors to a No. 1 ranking. Morgan Stanley pulled in almost $10 billion from the division last year.

Along the way, he gained notoriety for a unique style of leadership. After getting worked up about the size of another executive’s office, feeling it was too big for his position, Pick called in a construction crew over the weekend and had the walls moved to shrink the room.

After his success in equities, he got another challenge: resuscitate the fixed-income division, the bank’s perennial sick child that struggled to keep pace with larger rivals. He started in 2015 and soon pared almost a quarter of the workforce in that business. The division’s recovery since then is now touted as a success story by the bank’s leadership.

Then in 2018, Pick was given additional oversight of the firm’s dealmaking unit. But the mandate there was easier: Don’t break it.

There have been sore spots.

The prime brokerage division that Pick helped build into Morgan Stanley’s crown jewel, got caught wrong-footed in March when Bill Hwang’s Archegos Capital Management collapsed. The revelation that Morgan Stanley lost $911 million on dealings with the family office outed it as U.S. banking’s biggest loser in the debacle.

It was a rare misstep for a manager who obsesses over preventing them. Long plastered in his office was a quote from his mentor, John Havens, that read: “If there’s risk involved, eliminate it.” Or as Pick has put it more colloquially: “You have to manage the f--- out of it.”

Office Shrine
Pick’s office is known to serve as a shrine to Morgan Stanley. Visitors sit on Vikram Pandit’s chairs or Colm Kelleher’s couch and are surrounded by the memorabilia of other leaders who’ve come before.

His beloved collection of spy novels also finds pride of place, as does a copy of “Billion Dollar Whale,” which unpacks the shocking heist of a Malaysian investment fund, aided by Goldman Sachs investment bankers.

The diminutive Pick was known on the trading floor for his outsized personality and a fanatical devotion to Morgan Stanley. It wasn’t uncommon to see him loosen his tie and run up and down among the desks, seldom shy of getting in people’s faces.

One underling recalled briefly entertaining a job offer from a rival firm after failing to make managing director. Pick snuck up behind his workstation and whispered: “If I hear you speak to them again, I’m going to crack your head.”

When the startled trader turned around, Pick was already strolling away, smiling. The message, the employee said, was that the boss knew he had turned down more money to stay at Morgan Stanley. He took it as motivating.

“That’s not exactly out of a corporate communications handbook in terms of motivation, but it shows you he’s very straightforward and passionate about his job,” said Roberto Mignone, a hedge fund manager and a good friend. “There used to be that phrase WYSIWYG with old computer modeling—what you see is what you get.”

Baiting Blankfein
Pick spent his early childhood in Venezuela, where his father worked for a few years before heading back to New York. He studied at Middlebury, a private liberal arts college in Vermont.

That was fortuitous for Pick, whose cohort included the son of S. Parker Gilbert, the former Morgan Stanley chairman who took the firm public in 1986. Pick eventually got an interview at Morgan Stanley, making the bank his lifelong home, aside from a stint in business school.

He now works from the 40th floor, just a few doors down from CEO James Gorman and the leadership team. His co-president is Andy Saperstein, a longtime Gorman confidant who runs the firm’s massive wealth-management operations. Gorman’s bet on building that business has made Saperstein an equally plausible succession candidate.

Pick never seems to tire of playing up Morgan Stanley’s image as a scrappy underdog. While visiting one of Goldman Sachs’s offices, he nicked a pencil and later groused about how even their stationery was better than what Morgan Stanley had on offer.

He’s also recounted the time, more than a decade ago, when he was at a New York Rangers game—his lifelong team—and crossed paths with Lloyd Blankfein, then CEO of Goldman. Pick introduced himself as working for a small firm that Blankfein had probably never heard of. When Blankfein took the bait, Pick delivered: “Morgan Stanley.”

“If he met me that way, I would have gotten the last word,” Blankfein assured when asked if he recalled the exchange. “Like telling him I never heard of Morgan Stanley or asking if they made power tools.”

—With assistance from Sonali Basak.

This article was provided by Bloomberg News.