This former Deutsche Bank exec gave it all up to run a Brooklyn music school | Impact - Fast Company

This article was originally published on Stanford Business and is republished here with permission.

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Chad Cooper left a fast-track career at Deutsche Bank when the struggling Brooklyn Conservatory of Music called his name. Here’s why he did it.

Chad Cooper
Photo: Cole Wilson

Chad Cooper’s managing director position at Deutsche Bank in New York came with a substantial salary, bonuses, a generous expense account, and business-class travel. “I didn’t have 12 secretaries or people feeding me grapes or anything like that,” says Cooper,  “but it was the life of a banker.”

Two years ago, after a 16-year Wall Street career—and with the blessing of his wife, fellow Stanford Business school graduate Claire Ellis—Cooper, 45, walked away from all that to take the executive director’s job at the nearly insolvent Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. In doing so, he willingly stepped off his chosen career path and into a subterranean office that doubles as instrument storage space in the conservatory’s five-story Victorian building.

“I realized I could continue on in banking for a while,” Cooper says, “or I could jump in and do something that was really calling to me.”...

Cooper is also walking the walk: He recently started taking piano lessons himself.
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Source: Fast Company