I remember telling the CEO of U.S. Trust Co. in New York that I was jealous of his job.
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” he said.
“What did I do today? One V.P.’s secretary went on vacation, and he asked another V.P’s. secretary to take some dictation for him. (This was in the days before e-mail made bank officers learn to type.) “Well, the other V.P. screamed that this was his secretary and he was not going to lend her out to anyone else. Adjudicating this took the entire morning.”
Any CEO will tell you that as soon as he or she reaches that exalted position, even close friends will clam up rather than be bearers of bad news. So a friend of mine who was the CEO of a western Indiana community bank was lucky that his secretary would tell him what was going on in the bank.
But one day she told him that two top officers, both married to other people, were having an affair, and were engaging in their amorous activities right in the file room of the bank.
What should he do? Suppose he confronted them and either disciplined or fired them. The rest of the staff would know in an instant who had tipped him off; his secretary would be cut off from the bank grapevine.
The other choice was to ignore the shenanigans and protect his secretary from ostracism. That is what he did.
At a New Hampshire community bank where all officers did multiple jobs, a V.P. of marketing volunteered to be the treasurer of the local college, pro bono. He figured that he would not only be doing good but also enhancing the bank’s image in town.
But the college was in deep financial trouble. His solution: Write checks on the bank for the college’s employees but bounce the checks when they cleared.
The CEO found out. The V.P. had done nothing dishonest, but the CEO was afraid this naive tactic was a harbinger of screw-ups to come. The V.P. was forced out of the bank but got to keep his retirement benefits.
The considerations that go into picking a CEO are not always earthshaking either. A friend of mine who became one told me this story: Her rival for the job was sitting at his desk one Monday counting and rolling coins collected that weekend at a benefit for his wife’s favorite charity.
The chairman walked into the bank, saw him hard at work, and decided: This is not the man I want as the next chairman.
That, my friend told me, is how she got the job.
