GUEST COMMENT: Far too many senior bankers are a pointless deadweight
So, Lazard has parted company with Ken Costa. According to the The Times this may have had something to do with the fact that Ken didn't bring in quite as much business as expected.
Well wasn't that predictable? Too many banks are stuck with the delusional belief that a senior rainmaker will make all the difference. It won't.
The CEOs who drove banks into the ground before the financial crisis are long gone, with the cash. But we still have an industry that's replete with a lot of high earning senior staff who don't pull their weight and a lot of juniors who work themselves to death with less and less to show for it.
Some firms have more unproductive seniors than others, Lazard is known for it: last year it cleared its ranks of MDs in an effort to reduce its cost base. Citigroup and HSBC are also said to hold onto people for longer than others, although I can't vouch for this personally.
My own experience suggests that even US investment banks will tolerate lazy and exploitative behaviour when it brings in a fee.
When I was on the sellside, one of the top fee-earning MDs in my group was also incredibly lazy and disorganised. Windswept hair, tall, charming and good-looking, he'd swan in to work at lunch-time, talk loudly on the phone (speakers on full pelt) and disappear at 5p.m. brandishing his sports bag.
This would be bad enough in itself, were it not for the fact that the MD in question also had a very detrimental effect on the rest of the team. The master of the 6p.m. work-dump, he'd return from the gym and drop a huge presentation on an unsuspecting junior's desk.
This poor soul would be told, "Don't sweat it, 9am tomorrow should be fine."
His chaotic schedule caused at least one analyst to leave. But clients loved him and that was all that mattered.
The tradi-comedy in all this is that while the senior bankers earn a fortune and lead the industry into disrepute, it's the juniors who work incredibly hard and are left to pick up the pieces.
The average non-banker is not able to discriminate between the two. No one has any sympathy for juniors, the proletariat of the banking community. We're the ones who suffer the awful tightness in the back of the cranium that comes from pulling three all-nighters in a row. We're also the ones who'll be stuck in this industry until we get old, while today's smooth senior staff retire on the money they made in the decades past. Somehow, it doesn't seem entirely fair.
