Many years ago, in my penultimate year of high school, I had a friend, Roger*, who at his first attempt became the best in the school at Long Jump. He was 16 at the time. He jumped a record 7.85 metres at the school during trials and 7.25 metres in competition. He never trained and never had a coach. He just turned up and made sure his first jump counted.
For the 7.85 metre jump he took off from around 50cms behind the line to ensure the jump wasn’t a foul.
As was socially customary at the time all of his friends said the jump was a fluke. As Roger wasn’t really interested in long jump he soon forgot all about it. In his own mind, his social circumstances certainly didn’t make him any better than his peers. He just didn’t feel special.
Over the years I’ve often wondered if this really happened as I remembered it or whether I’d imagined that it had happened.
To put his accomplishment in perspective, the winner of the under 19 Australian All-Schools champion that year achieved a jump of 7.49 metres. Six years later Gary Honey (pictured) won the Olympic silver medal with a jump of 8.24 metres – that’s 39cms longer than a 16 year old kid who had jumped maybe a dozen times and certainly never trained for the event. Just think what Roger could’ve achieved had he been able to train.
And while Roger’s achievement was included in the athletics records of the school – proudly displayed in the canteen along with all the other athletics records – when we left school no-one ever saw or heard from him again. It was decades before I returned to the school and saw the record still stood. It was then I realised that an opportunity had been lost.
Perhaps he deserved a modicum of recognition. So, why wasn’t he promoted? Why didn’t he go on with it? Where were the talent scouts?
Roger never jumped again. Ever. It never crossed his mind. He wasn’t the least bit bitter about it.
You see in those days athletics was an amateur sport. That was useless to him. He needed a roof over his (and his parents) head. Both his parents had become unemployed and had a mortgage. Long Jump just didn’t pay the bills.
Roger’s story reminds me of the many bankers and brokers out there that do the right thing every day. Reading about the recent Royal Commission you could be forgiven for thinking that the industry is full of cheats and crooks. It just isn’t. In the main banks are staffed with decent people that want to help. Sure, there are some silly policies and processes but you could say that about every industry. Just remember – and I’m sorry to say this again – that the RC was into misconduct so it wasn’t focusing on what banks did right.
There are some extraordinary things being done by bankers and brokers for customers on a daily basis but, like Roger’s deeds, you will never hear about it.
A few years ago I was working for the institutional team of a commercial bank. I used to bank insurance companies in Australia and New Zealand. At the time, one of my clients had got themselves in a bit of trouble and its dozen or so banks were keen to get repaid.
At a bankers’ syndicate meeting it was all but decided that we would declare an event of default and demand our money back (it was in the hundreds of millions). The insurance company would be wound up and around two thousand employees would be out of a job. That was that.
Except it wasn’t. A very clever analyst in my team convinced me otherwise with financial facts which were specific to an insurer which he and I had co-incidentally been discussing weeks earlier. We spoke with our credit team and they agreed to look at it again. We spoke with the company and a new structure of debt and equity started to take shape.
My analyst worked without complaint the entire weekend and every day and night for the next 5 days to deliver the numbers and credit paper required for the board to make a decision by Tuesday. We succeeded. The company is still around today and is very profitable.
There was no extra pay for that credit analyst (or the rest of the team) or a bonus or anything else. He did it because he thought two thousand people losing their jobs required another look.
It’s all been forgotten these days but it’s up there with Roger’s achievements in my memory. The credit analyst was promoted a few years later but others – who perhaps didn’t deserve a promotion as much as he but suited the culture of the organisation more – have well and truly surpassed him.
At the time there was tremendous pressure placed on me to manage that analyst out because he didn’t fit in to the team – culturally. I resisted the pressure and pointed to his work – which I felt was being completely overlooked. I spent the next two years highlighting every minor achievement this young man accomplished as I was nervous about his prospects once I left the organisation. This made it quite difficult to manage him out for cultural reasons.
I also started to alter the culture of my team and was tremendously assisted by the resignation of a cultural ring-leader who was enormously incompetent in the role they had to carry out each day.
Unfortunately, that’s the problem with banking these days. Talent has been supplanted by culture. Surely some balance between the two is required. Until that imbalance is corrected no-one will save the next company that teeters and could’ve been saved.
Perhaps that can be covered in the next Royal Commission into financial services.
* Not his real name.