Praise for Lissack

In 1999 Worth Magazine described Lissack as one of "Wall Street's 25 smartest players"^[10][11] and as one of the 100 Americans who have most influenced "how we think about money" in 2001.^[12]

Yield burning scandal

In 1994, Lissack exposed a major yield burning scandal on Wall Street.^[5] The issue was eventually settled by a number of firms for over $200 million,^[13] to which Lissack was entitled to at least 15% per federal whistleblower laws. Lissack used some of these funds for charitable purposes including endowing a professorship in social responsibility and personal ethics at his alma mater, Williams College.^[14]

In February 1998, Lissack entered into a voluntary agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission whereby he was banned from the securities industry for five years and paid a $30,000 fine,^[15] as part of an arrangement by Lissack's legal team for Lissack to be on record as taking some responsibility for the scandal.^[16]

In 1998 Lissack was charged by the Manhattan District Attorney's office with making online solicitations for people to harass executives of his former employer, Salomon Smith Barney, by calling them at company headquarters and in some instances their homes.^[17] He pleaded guilty to second-degree harassment (a violation and lesser offense than the misdemeanor harassment charge with which he was originally charged ^[18]), admitting he sent phony e-mails to Salomon Smith Barney employees.^[19][20] The guilty plea was the result of "a prolonged feud between Smith Barney and Lissack over his whistle-blowing allegations of abuses by the firm and other participants in the $1.3 trillion municipal bond business".^[19] As part of the plea, Lissack was not sentenced to jail and paid no fine.^[19]

Alleged harassment of Timnit Gebru

In February 2021 it was reported that Lissack engaged in a campaign against Timnit Gebru following her departure from Google including an extensive twitter campaign and emails to her and her supporters. Gebru was a co-author of a paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?^[21] the publication of which resulted in her departure from Google. Gebru stated that Lissack was stalking her and colleagues.^[22] In consequence he was blocked for a period from Twitter for harassment. Lissack's response stated that his goal had been to ensure downloads of this critique of Gebru's co-authored paper which had resulted in her exit from Google. Jeff Dean, lead of Google's AI division, denied any connection with Lissack and asked him to cease making unsolicited contact with people on the subject, stating that "This kind of behavior has no place in scientific discourse".^[23]

Books

In 1999 Lissack published The Next Common Sense (1999)^[13][24] This work co-authored with Johan Roos presented the concepts of Identity, Landscape and Simple Guiding Principles. These principles were used to develop the Real-Time Strategy used in the first Lego Serious Play application.

In 2011 Lissack also authored the book Coherence in the Midst of Complexity.^[25]