What did a janitor, a Harlem canvasser, a de facto educator, and two car thieves have in common?
Answer: They were all bankers.
At a Continental Airlines staff meeting one time, a pilot asked then-CEO Gordon Bethune: "Why do the sales agents who just sit on the phones get the same bonuses we get when Continental is at the top of the on-time lists for the month?"
Bethune took off his watch and held it up. "See this?" he said. "Tell me one part of it that is not necessary for the watch to work correctly."
When I taught a course on economics for Citibank, everyone arrived in business attire - except for one semester when two men wore lumberjack jackets.
"What do you do for Citi?" I asked them.
"We repossess cars."
What a job! They would sneak into a delinquent borrower's driveway in the dead of night, break into the car, and drive it away. Both men told me they have been shot at several times.
But they were Citibankers.
The janitor worked at a Rhode Island bank. If his pride in what he did and how much he saved the bank was typical of the staff, it was clearly a first-rate operation.
Here's the innovation he was proudest of. Instead of changing lightbulbs one by one as they burned out, he had a regular schedule of replacing all the bulbs. This was much more efficient, cheaper, and got the bank a tax deduction - for donating the old but good bulbs to a nonprofit.
The same fellow also developed a way to use wastepaper to help heat the bank.
The Harlem canvasser was a so-called "street banker" for Chemical Bank, now JPMorgan Chase. His job: walk the streets of his territory, get to know the people there, learn about their hopes and dreams.
Many of those he met would have hesitated to go to a branch for a loan - but he could size them up and make loans on the spot. His success rate in helping people get started and having them repay their loans was tremendous.
The de facto educator was Harmon Martin, an assistant vice president at Citi who had more clout among the staff than most of the top brass.
He was the head of the Citibank Foundation, whose mission was to ferret out promising employees and give them money and time - as much as two years - to get a college education.
He also had a tremendous success rate, and his name evoked expressions of warmth and even reverence.
I met an executive vice president who came to Citi as a high school graduate and was given two years at Princeton - full tuition and money for expenses.
He told me he went to the Princeton administrators and said: "I have only two years to get an education. I want to do double work to get a four-year degree." He graduated with straight A's.
Janitor, canvasser, educator, car thief. It takes all kinds to make a bank tick.
Mr. Nadler, an American Banker contributing editor, is a professor emeritus of finance at Rutgers University Graduate School of Management in Newark, N.J.
