Citi Turns 200: Internationalizing Senior Management
In celebration of Citigroup's 200th Anniversary, we are sharing stories from our rich history here on this blog. The 27th installation below covers how John Reed helped internationalize senior management. Read the 26th installment explaining how the credit card business revolutionized banking, here.
Internationalizing senior management
Reed follows Wriston's lead in fostering meritocracy throughout the organization, bringing opportunities to talented people from outside the United States
In 1970, as chairman of Citicorp, Walter Wriston, by nominating Lord Aldington and Franklin Thomas, began the process of creating a more diverse Citicorp board of directors. Shareholders recognized the value of diversity and elected the nominees. Succeeding Wriston as chairman, John Reed acknowledged the advantage that diversity - whether in terms of gender, race, or any other factor - brings to a global organization. He appointed individuals with a wide variety of backgrounds to senior positions in Citicorp. He was following a principle that, over recent decades, has served the bank well: putting talented people in senior jobs without regard to their country of origin. Among his early appointees was vice chairman Hans Angermueller, a Czechoslovakian-born German-American. Increasingly, senior management ranks contained individuals of many different ethnic backgrounds. For example, by 1985, Reed had appointed to the top management team two Asians who were to make notable contributions to the organization's long-term success.
The more senior was Pei-yuan Chia, a 47-year old Taiwanese, who was group executive in charge of the U.S. Card Products Group at the Individual Bank. Chia had joined the company from General Foods Corp. in 1974. As part of a drive to bring in marketing expertise from outside the bank when Citibank was placing new emphasis on consumer banking, Chia was put in charge of marketing and the ATM program in New York, before becoming managing director of the company's Belgian subsidiary.
At the same time, Victor Menezes, a 36-year-old Indian, was appointed senior corporate officer for Latin America and Africa. Menezes had run the Indian operation for five years before becoming country corporate officer in Hong Kong in 1983. He later rose to become chairman of Citibank and was senior vice chairman of Citigroup when he retired in 2005.
The principle of diversity was more entrenched by the time, in 2008, the bank had a Anglo-German chairman, Sir Winfried Bischoff, and a chief executive officer, Vikram Pandit, who was the first Indian appointee to that role in any major U.S bank.