Story 243
There is a specific kind of institutional dysfunction that promotes people because of their failures.
The former Head of Risk Product Management — one whose work sat at the heart of consent order remediation — never defined clear roles for his team.
Rather than providing vision and direction, he asked the people beneath him to tell him what needed to be done. He called it empowerment. But the team he was empowering had no background in ERM, no product experience, no stakeholder management capability — and by his own admission, no strategic thinking.
Empowering people who lack the tools to succeed isn’t leadership. It’s a shield. When the work remained undefined, when delivery failed, when the consent order milestones slipped — the blame had somewhere to go that wasn’t up.
The response from above? The program added several Managing Directors, elevating him further. Failure, in this institution, has a career path.
His measurable achievement was not delivery. It was empire. He ported the product roles from across the ERM function to solidify his domain, expanding headcount and organizational footprint while the actual consent order work remained undefined and un-agreed among MDs.
Even the success metrics that were established by work-stream were wrong and required unwinding at a very senior level. The only well-aimed dart that hit its target was his career.
In the words of Ricky Gervais: “When you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It’s only painful and difficult for others. The same applies when you are stupid.”