On creative destruction, transitions and such.
So first Stan, now Chuck. Who’s next?
I don’t know these gentlemen, and obviously I am not privy to the internal workings of the financial behemoths that they were charged with piloting, but I wonder if the problem isn’t so much who is at the helm but the ship they were trying to steer. As Mr. Prince said, taking personal responsibility was the “honorable thing to do” as a leader (I’m reminded of the immortal words of Hopper - “The first rule of leadership: everything is your fault”) and I would tend to agree. And there is no reason to cry for these men - they were amply rewarded for their efforts and will - I’m sure - land on their feet so to speak, so don’t misunderstand what is to follow as sentimental apologia for their failings (real or perceived.) However I wonder if these giant firms are manageable at all - at least under the current constructs of managerial science - and ask honestly if any one individual however smart, charismatic or experienced (Mr. Rubin would seem to have all these qualities in excess) can realistically succeed in steering the turn-of-the-21st-century financial megafirm through the oceans of Extremistan (Mr. Taleb’s metaphorical “province where the total can be conceivably impacted by a single observation.”)
For some years now, I have been interested in trying to understand how the corporate ecosystem would change under the effects of the onslaught of accelerating social and economic change driven by the revolution in information and communication technologies. Applying Coase’s Theory of the Firm to a world where communication and transaction costs move unrelentingly towards zero (at least in many contexts) must in my mind lead to a fundamental - quantum - shift in the optimal organizational dynamics of companies and the economy more broadly speaking. The vision I seem to be ineluctably drawn towards is one that looks like the classic map of a network, containing millions (or billions) of nodes and interconnections, with a fractal geometry. So yes I do think that ’super-nodes’ (read mega-corporations) will continue to exist and even grow, but I think that complexity will migrate away from any particular node to the network. So in my mind, bigger is only sustainable if ’simpler’. Today’s financial behemoths are anything but ’simpler’.
If we look back from a vantage point twenty years hence, I suspect that the period between 2002 and 2012 (or so, I’m not hung up on exact dates…) will be seen as a transitionary period - when the one wave (of linear giganticism) crested, and another of specialization and the migration of organizational complexity to the network (the “edge”) emerges. Will the takeover of ABN Amro be the last of the mega-mergers (although and perhaps fittingly the 3-way break-up involved added an element of deconstruction to the transaction…)? If I had to guess, probably not but it will more likely be ‘one of’ the last of its kind. Of course, I am far from alone in wondering if these giants have passed the point of diminishing returns on scale (from the BBC article on Mr. Prince’s resignation:)
“The actual structure of Citigroup is broken - it’s too big, it’s too bloated and we think it should be broken up into three of four pieces,” added Bill Smith from Smith Asset Management in New York.
(and Frank Partnoy’s early take on this from an FT editorial in April 2005:)
Ronald Coase, the economist, famously observed that private companies are different, because they are not the only place to do business. An alternative to costly and complex banks is an atomised market, where individuals and institutions do business without a large financial intermediary. Banks may merge to survive this inevitable transition; but in the long run many of their functions will disappear…the core functions of any Wall Street Bank cannot remain inside the same complex and costly shell forever.
Given this is probably a topic worthy of a doctoral dissertation (and if done well perhaps a Nobel prize in 25 years), there is no way I can even start to do it justice in a short blog post, but I hope I have been able to give at least a taste of how I think this might play out and why it is likely to be a core consideration in any investment thesis for financial services over the coming two or three decades.
Update: Link to WSJ article on Citi’s troubles.
