A few years ago I wrote a blog about the time I gave a speech to the 50 top CEOs of the United States.
Here is the blog followed by my report on what I told the CEO's but did not include in the blog:
“I was the surprise guest speaker at a meeting of the top fifty CEOs in the United States.
It was a surprise for two reasons. First I was having lunch in the Bois de Boulogne Park in Paris when a friend Gifford Pinchot asked me to talk to the group he was teaching upstairs from the restaurant. Lunch in Paris turned into a talk with the top CEOs and some future business.
Second, by the time of the lunch, over more than a decade, I had become a prominent advocate of openness in business but the 50 CEO's had read about my exploits as a bank vice president as described in a whole chapter of Gifford's bookIntrapreneuring. My exploits, which significantly changed the credit card world and banking, were mostly based on sophisticated manipulation of top management.
I explained that I was now a firm advocate of openness in business. I had an audience revolt on my hands. They wanted to know how I had so successfully manipulated management.
They had good reason to want me to talk about my old self. They wanted to immunize themselves.”
There were two stories that I didn't report to you, my readers. The first is about how I got the modern multi-bank-credit card started and the second was how I introduced the consumer CD (certificate of deposit).
In the first case, after I had met with my peers in bank marketing and convinced them that we could start a credit card ourselves, we arranged for the next meeting to be in our law offices so that there would not be any legal presumption of collusion. At the second meeting (at the law offices) the whole idea of a joint bank credit card was approved by the lawyers. At that point we agreed to begin hiring personnel to get the project underway. I recommended that the subsequent meetings be made up of our executive vice presidents.
That was highly manipulative of me because I knew that if any one bank executive vice president felt he was so important as to be with the other major bank executive vice presidents, in San Francisco, he would most assuredly stand behind the idea of this new kind of credit card. They all did come to the subsequent meetings and every bank enthusiastically supported the new Mastercard.
The card went on to become the first global currency.
The second manipulative mechanism I used was to create the modern consumer certificate of deposit. Up until that point, roughly 1968, certificates of deposit, paying 5 percent by law, were only being sold to customers with more than $10,000. I found there was a significant market among people who had less money to put into an account that couldn't be touched for 90 days. After I had tested the idea in focus groups I sent a non-descript note to my top management committing them to support the modified CD. I then told the branches and the operations people to move ahead on the project in anticipation of an advertising campaign I was planning.
Management had not really understood the idea and only tacitly signed on, without knowing they had done so. After a modest ad campaign, so much money poured in that management was happy with what I had created. Management never second guessed my decision.
The new consumer CDs immediately spread to every other bank in America, it was too late to change our minds.