Story 233

Citi called it transformation. It fossilized in place.

There was a reorganization. We were told it would put the right people in the right roles. Performance would be managed. This institution was serious about change.

What happened instead is this: the people who had no business being in ERM technology stayed. People with no knowledge of data governance were moved into data roles. Incompetent personnel were moved into risk identification roles. Risk Analytics stopped at creating tools without driving business use.

The behavior that should have disqualified them — the deflection, the opacity, the contempt for the people beneath them — was treated as acceptable.

Meanwhile, competent people were maintained under them to do the actual work. The credit flows up. The blame rains down. And the cronies remain in post, making career decisions for the people who outrank and outperform them in every way that actually matters.

Here is what that looks like in practice: a manager whose entire career lived inside trading and banking book risk was handed a skills assessment to complete for a senior professional in enterprise risk management and regulatory compliance. Not because he was qualified, but because the process said he could.

The assessment was designed this way. Written by people who hadn’t earned their stripes in the fields they were assessing. And structured so that for a manager to retain their own title, they had to rate themselves above their reports.

And when those assessments fed directly into RIF decisions, the people most likely to survive weren’t the most qualified. That’s not a performance process. That’s a laundering mechanism.

If this is transformation, then the institution is telling you exactly what it wants: the same people, the same dynamic, a different org chart. Same BS, different day.

If this makes you feel sick to your stomach, what do you do?

You document everything. You raise complaints. You enlist a lawyer’s help to draft them because we need this institution unable to claim they don’t know. Disparate impact is key.

Don’t expect this to move fast. The people who built this environment have spent years entrenching it, and they will not surrender it quietly.

We are in this for the long haul.

By the way, “Project Bora Bora” is viewed as a metaphor for “nuking” the old bank structure. If the reference feels “radioactive” to you, it’s because Bora Bora is part of a region that was the site of a devastating 30-year nuclear testing program. A fitting codename for an institution that keeps telling itself it’s rebuilding, while the fallout is accumulating.