Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Banks and Bungee Cords

Your relationships, your job, your life comes with baggage. I recently made the analogy that there are bungee cords affixed to your belt. Some hold you back. Some propel you forward.

And it applies to banks too.

In a traditional SWOT analysis, there are things within your control (strengths, weaknesses), and things outside of your control (opportunities, threats). But what are the forces that propel you towards your strengths and opportunities? Or towards your weaknesses and threats?

These forces are mostly within your control. Should you choose to embrace the challenge.

Do you?

Here are the forces I see for bankers that pull them back, toward their weaknesses and threats:

1.  Regulators. OK, I'm playing to the audience. But regulators don't want you to veer off the beaten path. Keep it plain vanilla. Build a bank that thrived in 1963. Ask those bureaucrats this question: "How many businesses have you run?" Because you would swear by their swagger they were Richard Branson or Elon Musk.  

2.  Seargents. If you have hired me, or have read what I have written, you would understand that I believe there are "old-schoolers" in your organization that cause tremendous friction to progress and change. 

3.  "No Mistakes" Culture. The amount of energy that banks commit to being 100% in compliance, find no audit findings, or, gasp, no Matters Requiring Attention on their exam, is monumental, in my opinion. Some operations managers' evaluations and, in some circumstances, variable compensation is dependent on clean audits. What does that get you? Hyper conservatism in compliance. And a whole lot of "we can't do it" from executives. It's killing our industry.

4.  He's/She's Not Ready. This is a common reason I hear why banks don't elevate forward thinkers to the executive suite. They fear those "crazy ideas" they have in management meetings, or the fact that they are willing to accept some risks old school bankers would not. Better to keep them suppressed deep in the bowels of our organization and let others pilfer our future customers than to risk innovation through calculated risk taking.


Here are the forces that I see can propel bankers forward:

1.  Allowing Experimentation. And, 'gasp', failure. I'm not talking "bet the bank" failure. But a failure that may bust your budget is not Armageddon. It is an opportunity to learn, and help you implement the next innovation. Not the reason to look back 10 years and think, 'we tried and failed 10 years ago and, dag nabbit, we are not goin' to try again!'

2.  Fire Seargents. They are not that important to your organization. In fact, they are destroying it. And when you give them their packing papers it sends a message to the masses... "We are a forward looking bank. Backward thinkers take notice."

3.  Continuous Learning. A bank that believes everyone, from the CEO to the newly hired loan operations clerk, should learn, will have a far better chance to being the one bank that survives the non-stop tide of bank consolidation.

4.  Run the bank by strategy, not by budget. Strategy forces banks to look far out into the future. Running by budget forces bankers to look to next year. Where is the puck going, versus where it is. We intuitively know that our industry would not have yielded so much market share to outsiders if we could think outside of our budget. 


So you have bungee cords hooked to your belt. Where are they pulling you?

~ Jeff

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