Captains of the Industry

Business Week magazine and 92nd Street Y conduct these sessions called "Captains of the Industry", where Editor-in-Chief of Business Week, Stephen Adler,  interviews leaders in the business world in front of a live audience, that can also send in written questions to ask. Past "Captains of the Industry" interviewed in this series include Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell , Michael Bloomberg, Meg Whitman, etc. Jeffrey Immelt of GE will speak in the next few months.

Scott Carpenter, from Noon Day Ventures, kindly invited me to listen to Vikram Pandit (CEO of Citigroup) earlier this week. Here are some of my impressions:

The country was going through the most difficult times faced since WWII, with large banks being at the epicenter, and Vikram Pandit was put in charge of one of the largest and the most troubled financial institution. The amount of pressure on this individual over the last year or so was unimaginable. Yet here he was, conveying a lot of confidence in the future of his company. Stephen and Vikram were joking about 300% appreciation in stock price of Citi over the last few months.

There were some pointed questions about compensation, consumer protection, etc. He agreed with basic principles and the fairness in all these areas, but said very little about what he is going to do at Citi, or how the financial services industry is going to deal with it. Executive compensation is a big topic of conversation these days, both in terms of the staggering amounts of money involved and the kind of behavior that seems to be encouraged these days. I was initially disappointed to see the CEO of a very large company, part owned by taxpayers, not saying much about the $100 Million compensation paid to a single energy trader. After a couple of days, something occurred to me. To what extent greed is a factor in all this is anybody's guess. They can also be another, possibly bigger, factor at play here: who is going to bell the cat?

One of the comments Vikram made was that Citi used to be a balance sheet heavy company, and now the focus is shifting to being a client oriented company. To some extent, I understood what this meant - Citi had a history of growing by acquisition, and may have acquired all sorts of companies, without too much attention on which ones are critical to their primary mission, and which ones are not. What I didn't hear too much about is what he meant by being client oriented strategy. This to me was a let down - here I was, hoping to hear something more concrete than what was offered. What type of clients will be the focus of Citi's strategy is still a question in my mind.

Vikram also referred to shadow banks that are not regulated vs banks that are regulated. With Citi being the gigantic financial institution it is, I wonder about the parts of Citi that can be considered shadow financial institutions.

In summary, it was worth attending this event, as it got me thinking about a number of things, some of them listed above. I miss the company of one of my best friends from college days, Narasimham Batlanki - we used to spend hours figuring things out for ourselves, and discussing various topics ranging from politics to movies, sports to economics and everything in between. Our lives are too busy now to have those discussions. May be some day...


You can find the whole interview here: