From Running Prisons to Advising BMW: Quinn Spitzer Uncorks '82 Lafite and Hard-Won Lessons

At 22 he was the youngest state commissioner in Georgia history, working under Governor Jimmy Carter. At 31 he was helping run Arizona's prison system, overseeing 17 institutions and nearly 20,000 inmates. Since then, Thomas Quinn Spitzer Jr. has led the consulting firm Kepner-Tregoe, advised the board of BMW since 2008, and counseled executives in close to 20 countries. He's also one of Bill Green's closest friends and one of the very few people Bill will open any bottle in his cellar for. On this episode of Uncorked, Bill does exactly that.The conversation starts at Quinn's first wine auction in 1981, run by Christie's legend Michael Broadbent, where he bought a case of 1961 Latour for $100 a bottle and drank every drop. He tells the story of a mail-in bid that nearly bankrupted him, the Munich restaurant that had to destroy an empty bottle of Romanée-Conti by contract, and the blind tasting where a Finger Lakes Cabernet beat a celebrated Bordeaux and cost him a friendship. Along the way, Bill and Q taste Saddlehill's The Scribe and Proprietor's Blend, then open a 2011 Harlan Estate and a 1982 Lafite Rothschild, revisiting the Napa trip 26 years ago that first brought them to Harlan's barrel room.Between pours, Quinn gets candid about what separates great leaders from the rest. He explains why German automakers ignored years of warnings about China, why the best executives are the ones willing to admit what they don't know, how rubber-stamp boards fail the companies they serve, and why most businesses never do the "autopsies" that would keep them from repeating mistakes. He also shares what running a prison taught him about the gap between consulting and actually running something, including a fight with a city manager over the prison's sewage. The episode closes with his work in youth golf and Snider Hockey, and a lightning round answer that says a lot about the man.