Remember Ed Breen? No? He took over a well known company after it was rocked by scandal, pilloried by Congressmen and editorial writers and later had its senior executives sent to jail. He adopted a radical strategy and engineered a brilliant turnaround. It’s a lesson for banks today.
Presidential elections often produce useful communication lessons. Mitt Romney provided one in recent weeks as he struggled to address two big issues – his personal tax returns and Bain Capital’s jobs outsourcing. It’s an example of the risks that come with inauthentic communication.
Call me a contrarian, but I recently resumed my subscription to home delivery of the Financial Times. It must have brought a smile to the face of my local newsman, whose morning route has been lightened the past few years as my neighbors and I opted for getting our news on various electronic gadgets. I […]
One of the serious misjudgments by Barclays CEO Bob Diamond in the Libor scandal was his belief that regulators’ praise for the bank’s cooperation during the investigation would shield it from criticism. It did not. Diamond should have learned from Ken Lewis that you can’t count on regulators’ goodwill to protect you when things get […]
Facebook users were up in arms recently after the company replaced the email address that appears in their profiles with an “@facebook.com” address. The response was swift and negative, with Facebook fielding a raft of harsh comments in the media and across the blogosphere. Facebook responded with a brief statement distributed by email from an […]
Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal that engulfed Barclays last week is the method by which the rate is set. For more than four decades, the benchmark interest rate has been set by a group of banks, based on voluntary declarations of each bank’s borrowing cost, not actual trades. But […]
For the Barclays bankers who were fomenting a revolt to topple Bob Diamond earlier this week, the scene must have seemed eerily familiar. Most of them are veterans of Lehman Brothers, which Barclays acquired in 2008 following its collapse under Dick Fuld, the strong-willed executive who ran the firm for 14 years. Diamond, like Fuld, […]
On Monday, Barclays CEO Bob Diamond sent a letter to employees that he hoped would draw a line under the widening scandal over the bank’s manipulation of a key lending rate. But rather than relieve the pressure, the letter only increased it, and by Tuesday Diamond had resigned. His letter offers several lessons for scandal-scarred […]
John Thain, the CEO of CIT Group, recently was honored by a Manhattan charity and had some interesting things to say about public perceptions of the financial sector.
We seldom expect a Supreme Court justice to utter the defining sound-bite on a controversial public issue. But Chief Justice John Roberts did just that in today’s ruling on President Obama’s healthcare legislation.