How Bankers Think

There are many guides to breaking into investment banking. There are very few that take commercial banking seriously as its own intellectual discipline — with its own worldview, its own forms of judgment, and its own long arc of professional development.

How Bankers Think is built around a single argument: commercial banking is defined less by its technical content — learnable in a year — than by a specific way of looking at the world, which takes longer to develop and is the actual subject of every interview question, every credit committee, and every client meeting a banker will face.

The book makes that way of thinking explicit. Eight chapters move from the foundational worldview of commercial banking, through the specific instruments of credit judgment, into the deeper disciplines of declining and disagreeing — each chapter built around the frameworks senior bankers actually use and the dispositions they listen for.