Story 347
I met on a few occasions with the Senior MD leading remediation at Citi and her overseeing senior MD-level committee. During one of our first interactions, the MD was genuinely ecstatic that I had simply followed up on a request.
Not impressed. Ecstatic.
That reaction told me more about the transformation than any status deck ever could. If basic follow-up is rare enough to delight a senior executive, something is fundamentally broken in execution, delivery, and accountability—at scale.
Sitting with that group made the deeper execution gap visible: information doesn’t circulate.
The context behind endless regulatory requests never reached the people fulfilling them.
Because teams on the ground couldn’t convey how their work solved the underlying problem, requests just repeated indefinitely—same story, different wording.
No one had built the foundational instructions to ensure consistency across business lines, so templates changed incessantly as leadership groped for answers.
Underneath the narrative is the classic failure of bureaucratic program management: teams executing a checklist without the business intelligence to understand what they are asking for.
Consent order remediation isn’t a paperwork exercise; it’s an operational stress test. Citi’s transformation narrative claims alignment, but the reality on the ground is a masterclass in just looking busy.