THE INSIDER: Face it, your job is mundane
There was a recent article in the New Yorker about the value of checklists in medicine. The thesis was that medical practitioners would give vastly improved care with superior clinical outcomes if they adhered to some very simple procedures, specifically checking off specific best practice actions against a checklist. Included in these checklists might be things as simple as washing hands or swabbing before an injection.
The evidence for the impact of using checklists in medicine is undeniable. Their adoption led to significant improvement in clinical outcomes and major declines in infection rates. The analogy drawn by the author was that if checklists were a pharmaceutical invention, their efficacy would equate to a multi-billion dollar blockbuster wonder drug. However, despite the overwhelmingly compelling results from the use of checklists, the willingness for medical practitioners to adopt check list procedures was very low.
When you think about it, this isn't all that surprising. Can you imagine a seasoned professional doctor stooping to such a tedious, daresay, ridiculous, task of crossing off line items on a piece of paper, even - if in this case - the procedures were defined by a fellow seasoned professional doctor and not some acne-ridden 24 year old management consultant? The problem here is cultural. To call a spade a spade, professional clinicians are simply too arrogant to be receptive to any one telling them how to do their job better.
Highly trained and seasoned; big egos and arrogant; don't need anyone telling them what to do: sound familiar? Enter stage left, your archetypal investment banker, whether a corporate financier, a trader or a sales person.
The parallel between medicine and banking is striking. Both have a culture of front line professionals ruling the roost. In both, frontline professionals have specialised skill sets and with them typically large egos. In both, there is frequently an inverse correlation between the excellence of the frontline professional and their ability to manage team performance. In both, frontline professionals hate being told what to do.
I have little doubt that bankers would be far more effective if they followed at least some procedural discipline around how they do their job. For example, take a client pitch for a corporate finance mandate. There are process points around: producing an excellent pitch book; preparing for the pitch; conducting the pitch; follow-up actions. Take an institutional sales person; there are process points about servicing the client: understand the client business e.g. their benchmarks, the composition of the portfolio, their investing approach; understand what they value from a broker e.g. interaction with research, trade ideas, market colour.
Bankers may like to think their job is about flair and relationships. This may be true - on the periphery. At the core, however, it's the boring things that matter.
