Reflections on leadership: an interview with Walter B. Wriston, Citigroup CEO (Retired).

Citigroup was ranked seventh in the Fortune 500 for 2001. During that year, the company earned $112 billion from its banking operations in more than 100 countries. Standard & Poor's describes Citigroup as an extraordinarily diversified financial services holding company. The firm has five major divisions: commercial banking; consumer and commercial finance; investment banking and brokerage; life insurance; and property and casualty insurance. Under the current leadership of Sanford Weill, the company continues to grow via mergers and acquisitions principally in banking and investment banking.

Walter B. Wriston retired as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Citicorp and its principal subsidiary, Citibank, N.A., on September 1, 1984, after having served as Chief Executive Officer for 17 years and in various other positions with the company for 38 years.

Born in Middleton, Connecticut on August 3, 1919, Mr. Wriston graduated from Wesleyan University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Among several honorary degrees, he received a Doctor of Commercial Science from St. John's University in 1974.

Mr. Wriston joined Citibank in 1946, rising to President and Chief Executive Officer of the bank in 1967 and of the corporation when it was formed in 1968. He became Chairman in 1970.

Mr. Wriston is a Director of ICOS Corporation, Cygnus, Inc. and Vion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He was Chairman of President Ronald Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board, a member and former Chairman of The Business Council, and a former Co-Chairman and Policy Committee member of the Business Roundtable. He is a Trustee of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a Life Governor of New York Presbyterian Hospital and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Mr. Wriston is also a writer. Risk and Other Four-Letter Words, a collection of his essays, is published by Harper & Row, and The Twilight of Sovereignty is published by Charles Scribner's Sons. One of his widely quoted observations is: "Information about money has become almost as important as money itself."

Q. You have been a leader of modern money management. How would you advise young executives who aspire to reach the top in their professions, as you have. Are there any secrets you can share?

A. If the truth be told, most people's lives are a series of accidents. When they get older, they come to believe they planned it that way. I went from being a chemist to being a lawyer. Shortly after I was accepted at Yale law school, my father called me up prior to my registering and he told me that we would have to fight a war and, therefore, I wouldn't get through law school. When I came back from World War II, my wife was teaching school in New York, so I said I'd better get a job until the semester was over. My family doctor said why don't you work for a bank. I asked him to recommend a good one and he said Citibank. I went down there and got a job on a temporary basis and never left. That's the extent of my scientific career planning.

There are people who lay out long-term career plans that can be useful, but the real trick is to do whatever you are assigned to do as well or better than anybody else. There isn't any other way, unless your parent is the proprietor. The fact is if you do well in one thing, the word spreads around the water cooler that this man or women is pretty smart.

When I was with Citibank, we used to identify our top young managers, and these would be the people who would be moved to handle the most important opportunities in the bank. To make this work, we realized that we needed to reward our managers for developing their subordinates -- otherwise they would hide them. So we made developing key new people a part of the promotion and salary review requirements of management. That worked pretty well, and those young people came up and are now running half the banks in the world.

There is no one secret in rising to the top, however. My advice to young executives is to work hard and try to be the best at what you do -- and not worry about the next assignment.

Q. You've spoken of the collective genius of people in an organization and how people are the key to beating the competition. The question is motivation. How do you motivate talent?

Morale is an amorphous thing. But if you're a good bank officer, you can tell within 20 minutes whether or not it is a happy branch. People like to be on a winning team. If they think that the people running the store know what they are doing and treat their people with respect, and that they are running a meritocracy, people will be motivated. We always made it clear that we didn't care about family status, or the color of your passport, or your race or gender; all we cared about was if you could do the job. I think that has a tremendous motivating force.

We also believed that the person running an operation has to have integrity. That's number one. In addition, you have to recognize the people who do a good job by opening up growth opportunities for them. I personally tried to meet as many of the new managers as possible. My wife and I would open up the house and have new people to our home so that we could get to know them. People at the bank said it was an unusual thing to do -- but those managers remembered it and would tell me about it years later. You have to be willing to help people, too. I remember that one day my manager told me I had written one of the dumbest things he'd ever seen. The next day he introduced me to a bunch of CEOs and said I was going to be a senior credit officer one day. When I reminded him what he'd said the previous day, he told me he wouldn't have said anything to me if he didn't think he could teach me something.

Q. Complacency can undermine prospects for future success. How should leaders fight this personal and organizational challenge to ensure that progress is continuous?

A. One of the things you need to pay attention to is the competition. If you suddenly wake up one day and find that somebody is eating your lunch, you need to do something about it. The result is that people have to keep working hard to keep pace with change. People at Citigroup think they're pretty good -- and they are -- but you have to remember that there is always a better way to do something. One of the great things is that people are constantly coming up with new ways to do things, and we like to encourage that innovative thinking.

The greatest danger inside a corporation is when no one talks to anyone else. When that happens, divisions become separate silos, each trying to protect their own P&L statements. We believe that every area needs to talk to every other area about best practices. When someone comes up with a great idea, we try to give them credit and rewards for sharing that idea. If you don't do something concrete to encourage people to share their original ideas with others in the company, all the lectures in the world won't work.

I'll give you a quick illustration. I was in Paris one day and I said to the guys, "Why don't you sell any travelers checks?" They said: "When we sell travelers checks, the P&L goes to the functional unit in New York -- we don't get credit." So we invented a system that credited the branch for selling them, and suddenly sales took off. You have to figure out a system so people know that what they do is rewarded. Also, to do things better or differently you sometimes need to transfer people between groups. People come in with disparate experiences that can help them to see things differently.

Q. Do you see any major changes coming down the pike for the way major financial institutions will be conducting business?

A The law of science is the law of convergence. I've always thought that was true of finance, too. General Electric, Sears and just about everyone is in finance, nowadays. Almost every day you get a credit card application in the mail from companies you may not even have heard of. The convergence is there, but the building of the World Wide Web and the ability to move money in Os and is has substantially changed the way we work.

The innovations that will come tomorrow are going to make access to financial services even more convenient than they are today. When we put ATMs throughout New York City, all the other banks ran ads saying their tellers smile with pearly teeth, and who wants to talk to a machine? Our unspoken answer was that if you want money at 10 P.M., when those smiling tellers are home, you'd be glad to visit an ATM.

The iteration of the ATM was tremendous. So, the next iteration in finance will be one-stop-shopping that is easy to access from anywhere. The web has had a profound effect on the financial services business and will deliver new products as customer needs are identified. The key will be to have CEOs who are open to the opportunities. These CEOs will need to have a wide scan of current events and be broadly read. I don't care if people read paperback novels, newspapers or technical journals -- if you don't have wide vision, you're going to miss opportunities. You might learn something that can have an effect on the future of your industry. I am a great believer in very catholic reading tastes.

Q. The Chicago School of Economics advises against managers assuming the role of social saviors, as business is largely an economic enterprise; yet recognition of social responsibility among business is increasing all the time. What are your thoughts about the manager's need to include social responsibility in their organizational decision-making?