There Goes My Hero

It's now well into August and so the Edinburgh Festivals are in full swing. Taking place annually every August, there are multiple festivals which run concurrently, the most famous of which is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival - the largest performing arts festival in the world. Each year, over 50,000 performances of almost 4,000 different shows take place across the month, with performers and spectators coming from around the world. The population of the city doubles in August and the Fringe Festival, when taken as a single entity, is the third biggest ticketed ticketed event on the planet, after only the Olympic Games and the World Cup!

In my first few years in Edinburgh, I immersed myself in the festival, going to see several shows a week for the duration, especially when one of the venues had a deal with RBS (where I worked at the time) whereby they'd send an email every afternoon with a list of shows that evening which were selling poorly and you could apply for free or discounted tickets. One of the things which makes the Fringe so special is that the shows are unjuried, or open-access meaning that there is no application process. In order to have a show there, you simply need to write the show and persuade a venue to let you put it on! That means that there is less gatekeeping and gives room for a broader range of shows; however it also means that there is zero quality control! The best shows I've ever seen have been at the Fringe. And the worst shows I've ever seen have also been at the Fringe!

An AI artists's interpretation of the fringe festival where there are, for some reason, duelling bands!

Those free tickets reduced the cost and thus the risk of going to see a show which might turn out to be terrible and meant that I went to see things that I might ordinarily have passed by which, in itself, was a useful reminder that often the unheralded things in our lives are the ones which prove the most impactful. Now, however, eighteen years on, life has changed, my responsibilities have increased and the cost of tickets has risen dramatically in many cases. These factors combined mean that I no longer find myself attending with the same frequency as I once did, but I still love to catch a few shows each year and soak up the atmosphere of the city when the festival is on.

This year, one of the shows I selected was Make It Happen, a fictionalised satire by playwright James Graham about RBS during the years from Fred Goodwin's arrival in 2000, to his departure in 2009. A friend had seen the show during a short pre-Festival run at the Dundee Rep Theatre and was really impressed and keen to get my take on things, having worked for the organisation during the latter half of Goodwin's reign.

Firstly, the play was really enjoyable - using song, comedy and drama elements to tell the story of Goodwin's arrival at RBS from Clydesdale Bank, his rise to CEO, the small Scottish bank's dramatic takeover of the much larger NatWest bank, the company's rise to briefly stand atop the mountain of world finance, Goodwin being knighted for services to banking and, of course, the dramatic collapse from 2008 onwards into nationalisation by the UK government, with Goodwin departing the organisation in disgrace, having been stripped of his knighthood. Veteran Scottish actor Brian Cox appeared throughout as Scottish 18th century moral philosopher Adam Smith in a sort of Ghost of Christmas Past role, chiding Goodwin for his decisions and direction.

The first half of the play, to the interval, saw the rise of the bank and the painful second half saw the collapse and left me feeling somewhat uneasy as the Festival Theatre emptied into the Edinburgh summer evening. I've thought a lot since I watched it about my experiences at the time and how I'd during at various periods throughout the nineteen years since I first moved to Edinburgh to take up a place on the RBS graduate scheme. In the aftermath of the collapse I read both Iain Martin and Ian Fraser's incredibly thorough books on the story but I'd never reflected in detail about my own relationship to the leadership of Fred Goodwin during the story arc, until now.

In short, during those halcyon days in the early part of my career, Fred Goodwin was a hero to me. Here was a Scottish guy, from humble beginnings in Paisley, who had risen through the ranks at Clydesdale with a reputation for shrewdness and attention to detail, taken over a small Scottish bank and turned it into an institution the envy of the financial world. I joined an organisation in 2006 where he was held in such esteem and wielded such power, that the very mention of his name was enough to spark entire departments into action. Sometimes because there was something he actually wanted done and sometimes because people knew that the very mention of his name was enough to spark entire departments into action and that was an easily manipulated trick!

I'd studied Management Studies and Computing Science at University before joining the bank and those studies had included learning all about people like Jack Welch. The long-time and former CEO of GE, Welch's legacy has been somewhat revised in the intervening years but at the time, he was still held up as an icon of leadership. On reflection, perhaps I was looking for my own generation's version of Welch and, by being part of Goodwin's organisation, I had some loose association to him which gave a sense of pride.

Even during the time where things started to turn sour at RBS, I can remember the internal messaging being very different to what was being projected into the press and that was one of the things that really stood out when I read the two books I mentioned above. The story in the public domain was of trouble and likely collapse but the story internally was much softer - misunderstanding and a short term lack of liquidity - and I believed in Goodwin and his message. So much faith did I have that, even on a graduate salary, when the bank offered a rights issue in 2008 to generate £12bn to shore up their capital reserves, I bought my allocation! Needless to say that purchase stands up there next to the time I bought ten sets of casino dice from eBay, in the middle of the night, after twenty pints, or the time I went from the pub to a whisky auction and turned into David Dickinson with a pneumatic arm, as one of my all time worst uses of funds! But it should serve to show that I really believed that the external view of Goodwin and his stewardship was wrong and that he was the right man for the job.

I believed in him. I thought he'd been misrepresented and that he was going to turn things around, probably because I WANTED to believe that. It felt like his success had generated a lot of haters, people who had a strong desire to see him and the organisation fail, and so were lining up to throw stones and cheer his demise.

In retrospect, I was caught up in the hype. The hubris and arrogance is very clear in hindsight, but like a frog in a pan of water on the stove, the temperature crept up and I didn't notice until it was too late. I talk a lot now in my work with teams and organisations about how wins hide sins and this was absolutely true at the time. The success had been so significant in the years from 2000 to 2007 that people (myself included) overlooked how those successes had happened.

Like so much of what we experience in our professional lives, those years from 2006 to 2009 for me were hugely formative and I learned an awful lot about leadership which has informed how I think and act now; both things to do and, crucially in this case, things not to do. Part of me has become more cynical and critical about what I see and hear from businesses and that gives me the impetus to ask questions and generate reflection in the leaders I work with. And in my own life, I work hard to create the space to reflect on my own values and ask whether I'm acting in alignment with them, in every aspect of my life. I've never been visited by the ghost of Adam Smith (not the ghost of any other philosopher!) but considering the information I consume and how I choose to interpret this, is something else that's proved powerful. It's easy, especially in these data-rich times, to get swept away in a sea of other people's ideas but much harder and much more valuable for us all to generate and critically assess our own.