Bankers Trust
has undergone many transformations since its founding as a domestic
trust company in 1903. But the last two decades have seen perhaps the
most dramatic series of changes.
As president, deputy
chairman and chairman, Charlie Sanford has led Bankers Trust through
our recent years of metamorphosis. Now as he prepares to end his 34
years of service to the corporation, and as Frank Newman takes on the
responsibility of guiding Bankers Trust into the future, it seems appropriate
to look at how we have responded to change in the past, how we have
capitalized on the opportunities of the present and how we are building
for our future, and our clients' futures as well.
Today, the culture
of Bankers Trust welcomes -- in fact, thrives on -- change. One of the
most important principles by which we guide ourselves is that we seek
to be agents of change, not guardians of the status quo. Bankers Trust
encourages entrepreneurship and innovation because we recognize that
the respect and trust of clients is best earned by providing products
and services that add value and create wealth for them.
But Bankers Trust's
culture was not always this way. As Harvard University professors John
Kotter and James Heskett noted in their book Corporate Culture and
Performance, transforming Bankers Trust's culture took an enormous
amount of will and determination. Talented managers were given the authority
-- and the resources -- to run their businesses as entrepreneurs. The
firm began to compete for the brightest recruits with the top investment
and commercial banks. The new measure of performance was how well people
challenged external standards. And as we changed Bankers Trust and the
way the company did business, we found that we were also making changes
in the fundamentals of the financial industry...
... Not all of
these changes were easy to make -- in fact, change is often difficult.
But one of the reasons change is so exciting, and so vital to a living,
growing corporation, is that in the process of anticipating or reacting
to changes, one will create new solutions that test the status quo.
Not all of the new solutions will work -- neither we nor anyone else
will have a perfect track record; we must all be willing to accept some
disappointments -- because they teach us just as surely as the successes.
The challenges
we have met, the changes we have made through the years have made Bankers
Trust a stronger firm: stronger globally -- more than half our revenue
now comes from operations outside the United States; stronger in terms
of the range and depth of products we provide -- now offered through
local operations in nearly 50 countries and stronger financially --
our ratio of capital to risk assets is the highest among our peers.
The Bankers Trust
of today is in many ways a different firm than the Bankers Trust of
twenty years ago -- or even ten. But today's Bankers Trust professionals
make the same commitment Bankers Trust professionals have always made,
a commitment to serve our clients creatively, reliably, and with the
highest level of integrity. Whatever businesses we engage in, wherever
in the world we work, we seek to create a positive impact for our clients.
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