There are no candidates for the wrong jobs

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The FT has noted:

Wanted: old banking hand with a halo to take on high pressure role in the political spotlight.

The emergence of Sir Win Bischoff as the frontrunner to become chairman of Lloyds Banking Group has highlighted the short supply of well-qualified candidates for leading roles in the sector.

The 67-year-old former chairman of Citigroup is in a small field of candidates at a time when three banking institutions are searching for new chairmen.

I guarantee you: he’s the wrong man.

But that’s not really the point. The reality is that the shortage of candidates to manage these banks is not caused by a lack of suitable people; the cause is that these banks are unmanageable. Win Bischoff could not manage Citi. He won’t be able to manage Lloyds.

When we create organisations that are ‘too big to fail’ management goes out of the window: it has to survive but the inherent conflicts in that process of survival are too great to reconcile, as recent events have shown. No one can reconcile those claims, so there are non candidates because the job is wrong, and that’s because the organisation is wrong.

The job of UK Financial Investments is not to offer up another failed banking grandee as a sacrificial lamb to Lloyds Bank; it’s job is to split Lloyds into manageable parts. Then appoint people to run it.


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