Cast your mind back to the year 1996. That year saw the Dow close above 6,000 for the first time. The Chicago Bulls won their fourth NBA title, and Mel Gibson’s Braveheart filled theaters around the country.
It was also the year when things started to go wrong for Deutsche Bank. At least that’s the view of its current chief, John Cryan. But instead of ripping up the history book, he’d do better to focus on the bank’s future.
Mr Cryan, who is struggling to get the banking giant back in the black after a $7.7 billion loss last year, recently told investors that Deutsche Bank is “correcting some errors that have been made over the past 20 years or so.” Let that one sink in. It’s a startling admission.
It’s commonplace for a new CEO to acknowledge past mistakes by predecessors. But to renounce the strategy of the past two decades? It’s hard to find precedent for that.
And exactly which of the bank’s decisions in that period would he regard as mistakes?
Well, 20 years ago Edson Mitchell, a hard-charging banker recruited from Merrill Lynch, was a year into his job. He was beginning a major push into investment banking and trading that would give the bank a major presence in the US market and culminate in the acquisition of Bankers Trust in 1999. It’s hard to imagine now, but at that time Deutsche’s investment banking operation was a rising threat to established Wall Street firms – and earning fat profits for the home office in Frankfurt.
Were these mistakes?
Or what about Deutsche Bank’s push into other new business areas during this time? Derivatives, emerging markets – particularly in Eastern Europe – and asset management, to name a few, were all profitable, growing businesses. Were they misguided, too?
Mr. Cryan hasn’t been more specific, but his comments suggest he is rejecting the effort that began 20 years ago to put Deutsche Bank in the top tier of global universal banks. What new strategy takes its place is far from clear. Mr. Cryan is hard at work on more immediate tasks – shoring up the bank’s capital position, cutting costs and resolving outstanding litigation.
Sweeping aside 20 years of strategy suggests that revitalizing the bank will be quite difficult. But then perhaps Mr. Cryan is only acknowledging what Deutsche Bank said in a recent financial report, in which it wrote off the goodwill associated with its $10 billion acquisition of Bankers Trust in 1999. Deutsche paid a hefty premium and had been carrying the goodwill on its balance sheet ever since.
Sometimes it is useful for an organization to explore its past. History can be a source of wisdom, even inspiration, for some institutions. But for others a look back is a distraction, and that seems to be the case with Deutsche Bank. Better to focus on what needs to be done now and leave it to the historians to chronicle the errors and triumphs of the past.
With a good plan, terrific execution and some luck, Mr. Cryan may yet occupy a favorable chapter in that story.