Not as important as your health or your soul, looking after your money is still high on the list of things you want to get right. That is why bankers, finance and fund managers are paid more than most people – more, certainly, than doctors and priests.

Most doctors and priests are pretty good. Not all, of course, but the majority stick to their vows and fulfil the obligations of their profession. So, it must be said, do many bankers. Although doctors’ and priests’ behaviour is somewhat regulated they are generally left to make decisions based on their consciences – and the results are mostly satisfactory. So they should be. They are teaching healthy physical and moral behaviour. They know the best teacher is example.

Were our medics and pastors to become over-regulated, problems like those in banking would emerge. Substituting conscience with guideline is the fastest way to hell on earth.

Do you think your money is being well and trustfully cared for? If your answer is ‘no’ then you may like to consider my following ten requests to the finance industry.

1. Drop the jargon. Use language we can all understand; treat us as literate but ordinary human beings.
2. Cut the “Products” by 95%. You only have one product. It is called money. There are no other “Products”. There may be some opportunities that a bank or fund is willing to guarantee 100%. We’d like to know about those, but they’re still money.
3. If a bank wants to act as broker for other investments let it have a broking division (or use its existing one) and let it charge those who use it for that service. At present we are all being charged for brokerage services whether we want to use them or not. We want basic banking.
4. Treat us as customers. At present your customer treatment is confined to your advertising. None of the things you promise in your commercials or press ads comes true for the normal customer. Ban the mind-blowing menus and the egregiousness. Being polite is conducive to good business; being egregious isn’t.
5. Be transparent. Your charges are so complicated that no normal customer can understand them. Obfuscation is a well-used tool of doubtful businesses but you are handling people’s hard-earned money, not selling baked beans. Your customers have other things to do than deal with their bank. Help them, don’t confuse them.
6. Make your charges realistic. Many charges are for sums of money so small that the cost of collection must exceed the revenue generated. Neither you nor your customers benefit from that.
7. Re-examine your “Relationship Manager” practice. It is obviously necessary to change relationship managers from time to time but having seven in two years – quite common – is hardly conducive to a relationship or to even discovering correct contact information.
8. Reduce your paper chase. We get more paper from our banks than we do from any other source. The vast majority of it is unnecessarily damaging the planet. Your words of commitment to green corporate social responsibility must be carried through to your paper-creating practices.
9. Look at your bonus system and your profits. The former is geared totally to selling and hardly at all to service. But you are a service, not a sales outlet. Are your profits commensurate with those of service businesses?
10. You are already over-regulated. Why? Has it worked? It happened because people lost their trust in bankers, not just over sub-prime but over a long time. It has failed because control without trustworthiness can never work.

Go on, you tell your financiers, too.

A business is not a mission.

So why do so many businesses have “mission statements”? Because they think that to print pious sentiments proves that they are Socially Responsible Corporations and this will convince people that they only practice decent business behaviour.

Mission statements are as effective as a fig leaf in a gale.

It is right that a business should aspire to serve all the parties who have needs of it or claims on it. Maybe a statement of the “apple-pie, motherhood and pre-martial chastity” sort fills the minds of work-experience interns with laudable thoughts, although most of the interns I have met are more savvy than that, and sometimes more aware of their social responsibilities than are their bosses. Better than universally accepted, desirable standards would be a list of exactly what these lofty ideals mean for any particular organisation.

Here are some of the realities.

Transparency is the first code of social responsibility. We don’t do the nastier things in our lives within sight of others. The points at which a business is subject to dishonest dealing can be spelt out and the light of scrutiny shone on them. If you’d rather other people didn’t know about it, chances are that it’s wrong.

None of us likes what we described at school as ‘sneaks’ – that cadre of maladjusted youngsters who aim to curry favour with teacher by exposing the minor offences of their classmates. But we are all quite glad of the prefect who prevents an arson attack during gym by exposing the fire monger. Every business must have the door open to the whistleblower who is genuinely concerned to prevent a tragedy befalling the organisation. Very few businesses seem to make responsible use of inside information.

Fairness dictates the larger part of whether employees are happy at work and yet very few organisations make it a focal point of management. When did you last see an appraisal form with a fairness rating on it? If ‘behavioural anchors’ are meant to cover the subject, why don’t they say so? In the businesses I built I never punished genuine mistakes, preferring to let people learn from them, but I punished unfairness ruthlessly. Malicious judgement is a killer scourge for any organisation.

Lying is an endemic problem in dealings of all sorts. It pervades business, authority, religion, education, the family. Can a business survive without lying? Except very rarely, where highly valuable commercial intellectual property is concerned, it can. If transparency is to be the watchword of the future, lying must be eliminated. The two are incompatible.

Surely Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) doesn’t cover these matters? Isn’t it about avoiding pollution, making the planet sustainable and contributing to the welfare of the people and places from which the corporation derives its commercial benefit?

It is certainly these things and more. But they are the consequences of the fundamentals I have listed above. Unless the fundamentals are correct CSR will become just another version of the fig leaf. The result of that is potential annihilation. As with disease, it’s no good tackling the symptoms if the body remains rotten. A medical plaster covers either something getting better – or something getting worse.
Capitalism has demonstrated that competition creates wealth and brings huge benefits including a longer useful life on earth. How can we reconcile capitalism with the right of everyone to have a fair crack at life?

Corporate Social Responsibility is potentially a major step in the right direction. Let us hope that we appreciate that it is created only by personal responsibility and does not have some sort of ritual, checklist life of its own.

How much of the restructuring we hear about in business is necessary? Certainly not all of it. The building blocks of any organisation are its people. Get them right and the organisation will work.

So does the structure of the business make much difference?

It does make some, and the trick is to know which restructuring is useful and which is superfluous window-dressing – or, worse, pure politics. It varies from one business to another so guidelines need interpreting but there are some general rules worth observing.

The efficient maximum number of people one person can manage is eight. If you are the boss of a largish business, probably two of these will be staffers in Head Office – Finance and the technical head of the main resource you employ; the rest will be line managers. Staffers shouldn’t take much managing, although it is as well to remember that they are people and do need encouragement. But a good staffer is like a General’s ADC, around when you need him and invisible when you don’t.

A business where more than ten people report to one level of management is usually inefficient. Managing people takes time. If you don’t devote that time poor management will leave the profits below their maximum.

However, in certain very labour-intensive businesses you could build a vast pyramid of management if you stuck rigidly to this rule. That is why the position of supervisor is so valuable.

Supervisors are the non-commissioned officers of business, interpreting the orders from the top to those at the coal face. In the old days in Hong Kong they used to be called Compradors and they were vital to the success of the Hongs. Every business needs them.

Among the jobs that a business structure has to perform is making cooperation between the different departments possible. Good communications do not come easily to many people and they need proactive help to make them work.

Failures in this area are mainly due to lack of understanding and I have found it helpful to get people to learn what the other chap does. A good example is the clash between finance and marketing. If you mix them up they start to understand the other function, working together more easily as a result.

All structures need to address the flow of the business, whether it is a production line or a city office. A good business flow works backwards from the customer; a bad one, forwards from the administrators.

Structure that is in place solely for the benefit of the managers is a disaster – customer unfriendly and form-proliferating. Controls are there to ensure the swift, economic service of the customer, not to prove that every mistake was someone else’s fault.

A valuable rule about any proposed change in structure, any hiring of new staff and any creation of new procedures is to ask what will happen if you don’t do it. Change is always difficult and invariably more expensive than even the best estimates. It causes unproductive stress and often loses the very people it was designed to keep.

Organisations are dynamic; they must adapt and grow especially in today’s rapidly advancing technological world. But we should never lose sight of the fact that people work best when they are in stable environments, where they can forecast realistically and when they have to live with the results of their work and decisions.

Restructuring is a necessary evil. It should be kept to a minimum, handled with tact and generosity and explained cogently. You don’t need to hit someone over the head to describe a hammer.