BankThink

Whatever you are measuring communicates focus and the desired attention of your team. Whatever you are not measuring similarly communicates a lack of importance.

In our current economic climate, it comes as no surprise that the financial services industry is under increased scrutiny. Therefore, it is no surprise that NCUA has taken a more aggressive stance regarding enforcement and administrative actions.

In the aftermath, the CEO noted, the credit union has found the fake bomb threat has put not just its emergency response plan into question, but has raised other issues it had not previously given thought to.

Banks need to wake up and smell their burning coffee. Small business loan demand is weak but for reasons most banks refuse to admit to this day: unreasonable loan terms.

Let's be honest. By now, you'd think that faxing would be dead, a victim of all those killer apps, such as e-mail, texting and IM, that came after it. You would expect that the only place you'd see a fax or hear the screech of a fax transmission would be in a movie from the '80s, or at an exhibit at the Smithsonian. But you would be wrong.

What few in credit unions ever seem to notice is that they are as much a part of the employers-reluctant-to-hire picture as everyone else.

"Hey diddle, diddle" to the seven Western natural-person credit unions that got the lawsuit against WesCorp started in November 2009, naming the officers and directors, but clearly targeting NCUA in their complaint.

It is time to clean house so credit unions can move on. What makes some of these executives believe they are above this problem?

Gather a group of financial industry experts and analysts around a table and there will be a gigabyte or more of opinions and predictions. But as one such recent roundtable showed, today those opinions and predictions carry with them any number of attachments in the form of asterisks and caveats.

Effective change requires applying fundamental principles. My doctoral research on successful organizations internationally suggests four such keys:.