Robert Paterson's Weblog

How not to suck at Crowd Financing - The Cultural Step

We live in an age of McBanking - where like McDonalds - unskilled people, relying on simple formulas, can only do simple things. If you don't have a job or a house, there is not much they can do for you.

If you are a under 40, without a job or a house, if you want a small business, a start up, or you are an artist or a maker: you are out of luck. Banks as we know them now don't know how to lend to you. So if you want to be part of the new economy, you are out of luck.

But not for long.  There are a whole new set of tools and organizations are emerging that will be able to help you. You may of heard of some like Kickstarter. Many have high hopes. But many are failing when they use these new tools. They are failing because many of the people who are using them, use them by applying the current rule set. 

The New/Old system of credit was based on your reputation and your network. The challenge that we have in using the new tools is that all we know is the old culture. The new tools will not work well for you if you do not make the changes in how you behave and how you see the world. You will be like the French in 1940 who saw the new tank as an old mobile pillbox. 

The secret of the new system is to understand and live the ancient network system. Here is a early chapter of my new book - You Don't Need a Banker - that I will publish on Kindle in early November. In this book, I will do my best to show you what went wrong and what is coming and how you can do well in the system that is coming. 

The key to your future success is to understand the cultural demands of living in a real network. So here to help us "get this" is a true story about how this used to be done.

"Personal Trust is the Core of Real banking

Trust is the core of credit and Trust is at the core of the real new network economy. As it always was.

It’s Personal. In the next few chapters we are going to examine the DNA of Trust, Networks and Trust Platforms. When we then look at the new Trust based financing systems, we will see how these rules are baked into the new. I hope then that you can use them to your benefit.

This is Georg Giese 1497 1562 from Danzig (Gdansk). Holbein painted his portrait when Georg was in London running the operations of the Hanse. He asked Holbein to paint this kind of picture to help him reinforce his Trustworthiness. For in that time, and now in ours, the more people could trust you, the better off you were.

I think that Holbein did a good job, don’t you? Do you get a feeling about who this man is? I see that he is a serious person. He shows me that he can read and write. He owns books. He has splendid clothes: but is not too flashy. He is obviously wealthy: but quietly so. He is young and so must be quite dynamic to have got so far so early in life. He is serious.

He looks trustworthy to me.

Georg of course had his own business. It was personal. He sold directly to his customers. Of course he wanted his customers to Trust him. But there was more. The reason that he had the picture painted and the reason that he placed such a value on his good name was that he was a member of a large network of merchants. He needed access to this larger network. He needed to be trusted to get access to this network.

The network, The Hanseatic League, his community, was the key to his future as it will be for you.

Why Trust? It’s all about your Network

Networks are what will give you, the tiny business, all you need to do well.

It will give you credit. It will give you access the markets. It will give you access to tools and support. It will defend you in times of trouble. It will enable you, the tiny personal business, to have power in an uncertain and dangerous world.

Map: Mikko Rautala

This map shows the network of the Georg Griese, the merchant in the painting. He is a merchant of the Hanse. The Hanseatic League was a network of merchants that started in the 14th century. It lasted until the late 17th century. For much of that time, it was the most powerful business entity in the world.

Each Hanse merchant lived in one of the cities along the coast. Each city had its own local infrastructure, halls, warehouses and ships. Georg’s local network in Danzig was his base. That was his local trusted network.

But then he had access to an even larger network. For all the cities combined into larger trusted networks to mobilize their fleets when faced with pirates. Or to break into new markets such as England where they built a network warehouse in London and negotiated a trade deal with the King. Georg Giese was painted while he was the agent of the Hanse in London.

 

Back to Valdis Krebs network map. The Hanse looked like this. Each city state was one of the sub networks. The Hanse was the whole.

On his own, Georg would have had no power. After all, like you, he had just a tiny business. But, as a member of the most powerful network in the world, he could negotiate with the King of England.

This is why he made trust so central.

The network demanded that you be trustworthy. There was too much to lose if you were not. Trust is so much more than a “Brand”. Then all of your life was lived in public. There was also no separation between your business life and your personal life. Every part of your life added or subtracted from your trust.

If you look at the foreground of his painting you will see a vase of flowers. They symbolize his commitment to his fiancé who is the daughter of a business ally. He is making a public and eternal statement for his wife’s family that this marriage is part of his life. He is giving his public word.

You could not even escape the actions of your family. This is why so many surnames are extensions of the father’s name. It is why I am called Paterson or you might be called McDonald or Johnson. It is why on Prince Edward Island, people still ask who your father was. We all know that how we are raised shapes our character. So how our family behaves affects our trust too.

This approach to life is very different from how we live today when most of us live in anonymously. Where we rely not on anyone’s word but on contract. When our families mean nothing in our business dealings. When we are told to keep our personal lives separate from our work lives.

The system we live in encourages anonymity. We can see the results online in the comments where people say things that they would never say face to face. But Georg lived in a world that had all sorts of systems that meant that his whole life was in the public domain. First of all they lived in a very small world. Towns were often less than 5,000 and no larger than 35,000 people where it was possible to know everyone.

The good news for us today is that we too once again can live in a village. The web connects us in the same way that the geography of the Baltic connected the Hanse. Our future depends on this village.

Secondly new tools are emerging that put our business onto public display as well. I call these Trust Platforms. Here is how they worked back then. When we see how they work, we will see that they guide the new tools that we have just bought back to life."

Watch out for You Don't Need a Banker - Coming to Kindle in November. 

The opening of my new book - You Don't Need a Banker

This October I will publish 2 short books the first is You Don't Need a Job, the second is "You Don't Need a Banker". 

They are the core of the monthly series I plan on how to thrive in the alternate world of the network economy.

Here is the opening of the Banker:

The Pioneer

I write this short book for a special person. For you. 

You are already aware that the system that we have lived in for generations is unwinding. You are not looking to the job market as your future. You are looking to have your own business.

What you want to do is based on what you love to do and who you really are. It may be that you love to sew. You love to grow things. You love to write. You make things. You don’t want to be Steve Jobs and build an empire. You want to be able to make a living doing what you love. You have no choice but to make this work, for there are no jobs for you.

You know that with the web, there is a market out there for things and services that are real. Real because they are made by you and you can be trusted. You are starting to sense that with this community, you might do OK.

But you have a core problem. Where do you get the finance that you need?

No bank will look at you. No Government development agency will look at you. You are too small and don’t have enough “ambition” to hire other people and to grow. You don’t have a “real job” . You may not own a home. You cannot in all honesty offer up a predictable business plan that shows clear markers of earnings growth over 5 years into the future. They laugh at your hopes that you can make a living by making children's’ toys or by growing vegetables on two acres and a greenhouse.

It may seem that you are stuck. But I promise you that you are not.

This book is all about hope. You will find that there is an entirely new credit system out there that is based on ancient rules of credit that is ready to help you. This book will tell you what it is and how you can become part of it. 

Modern Banking is McBanking

You are not the problem for the banks. They are the problem. 

They have lost the art of lending and have become like McDonalds, places where unskilled people assemble mass market products using an industrial formula.

Modern banking is only 35 years old. It is not how banking was operated in the past. It is a product of regulatory changes in the 1980‘s. It became a new business that adopted the Mass Production process. 

This new formulaic approach to credit was based on a simple industrial algorithm. The job and the home. Our job was a simple way of assuring a stream of income. Our home was a simple way of offering up up collateral. Using these two data points, a banker did not have to know anything more about you. He did not have to know anything about your character or your network. He did not have to know anything about your community or your place in it. Instead he relied on a formula. Like people in the kitchen at McDonalds.

This made sense back in 1980’s when 80% of us had a job. Jobs had become our normal. Back in in 1980, we all aspired to own a home. This all made sense. With such a simple view of who we were, banks no longer had to have staff that understood self employed people and entrepreneurs. We had entered the age of McBanking. 

The age of the job is over. We are half way back to where we were in 1800 when only 20% of people had a job. The age of all of us owning our own home is also over.

The core principles behind McBanking no longer work. Bankers, as they are now, cannot respond to the new reality either. Imagine asking a food assembler at McDonalds to cook a real meal from scratch? It cannot be done.

So this is why when you, the Pioneer Personal Business Entrepreneur, cannot be helped by a bank by a government agency. They have not the first idea of how to lend to you because you do not fit their job/house algorithm. 

Until 5 years ago, this was an impossible barrier.  But no longer. New ways of financing people just like you have been developed and are in place right now. The irony is that these new financing tools are based on ancient principles of how credit has always worked. 

 The new is all based on Trust and Community.

-----------

In the rest of the book I will offer you

• The Real Guide to Crowdfunding - based on experience with it and 30 years in the old business of banking
• An explanation of why the current system has to fail you
• What the eternal system is like
• How the ancient principles are coming back
• How you can use them
• What this will mean to you and to everyone
• Stories explaining how this is working now
• A call to real bankers everywhere to set up stronger new organization based on the eternal principles

 

We can raise money from our own community for projects

This week Patrick Ledwell completed a very successful project on Indiegogo to finance his new book. The details below.

I think that this is a model that we can use on PEI to "Crowd Fund" projects that we like. For until now, you would have had to go to a bank or to Government. Both are hard to do - take a long time - and have many burdens attached. 

This way we can keep our money in the community and have a real relationship with the person. Many of us have pre bought Patrick's Book - the big prize is a for a group who have signed Patrick up to perform for them and their staff. There is no end to how inventive we can be.

Watch this space as there are a couple of interesting projects that get at the core of our food system and at the needs of our kids in the discussion stages.

 

The Future of Manufacturing & Finance Printrbot + Kickstarter

Here is the link to this page - Here are 2 revolutions.

The first one is that soon 3D printers will be cheap enough for most homes. They will be what PC's were 20 years ago when I bought my son a PC from Future Shop. From this will come the revolution in manufacturing that we now see in media. Soon anything will be makable at home. We will move from mass production to mass customization with all the changes that that will entail.

You may have seen that too in this image.

Did you see the second revolution? 

He raised nearly a million dollars from a community funding site - Kickstarter. This is also the future of finance. Just as we don't need a newspaper or a publisher, we will not need centralized institutions like banks to finance what we need to fund our work.

My pal Patrick Ledwell just raised the funds he needs to in a similar system - Indiegogo - to fund a small publishing project. 

It seems inevitable that the institutions that ruled our world will be disintermediated like this. Look what is happening in education - Now Khan Academy - next Text Books etc.  

I am talking with some people who are going to do this to how we buy our food too - watch this space!

Why Banks as we have now ALWAYS get into trouble and what might work better

We have new media as a result of the network. The network and web is affecting all aspects of life. It will surely transform credit and banking too. Here is why and here is what might take banking as we know its place - a much older version of credit but now networked. This matches also the new BIG business - many very small networked to be large

The Economy - Banking and the Future - A Flight to Safety - The chickens are coming home to roost for the "full service bank". While the big banks may be too big to fail, the retail depositor is very nervous. Europe is on a knife edge. There is talk at a very high level about "Ring walling" the deposit side of banking.  We know how weak the US major banks are too. But I have no optimism that reform will be easy. But I do see the depositor looking for safety already. There is a lot of chatter about "maybe I should look to my credit union?". People are not stupid and know that there is a lot of uncertainty abut the big banks and little room now to support them. This I think is the environment that could offer Credit Unions a huge opportunity.

I think it is inevitable that we will see a flight to safety for depositors. This will be a long term flow as the major banks cannot get fixed fast and confidence always takes a long time to restore. 

Absorbing this flow of share will be a challenge though. Can Credit Unions scale without doing what the banks have done? How can they scale and still be rooted in community? How can Trust be maintained? Also how can Credit Unions serve the new market for the very small?

The Complex Nature of the Business World today - Our banks have fully adopted the machine or "Ford" model to cope with the Machine and Ford economy. This worked when we all played by the Ford rules. But here is the problem, Ford Banks" can only deal with the simple because they use machine rules. The Big banks like Big Business. It's easy to follow. They like "simple" like mortgages and credit cards - they are easy to follow.

What they cannot do easily is to get a handle on where most people and business is going today. That is the very small and personal business. This is very complex and being Complex, cannot be evaluated by simple rules

This new economy is based on networks of the very very small. It is emerging quickly and is ignored by banks as they are structured today. These enterprises are very human and so very complex. They don't have traditional assets. They don't operate in a simple linear way. The "rules" don't apply.

These new businesses also sell into a new market. A market that is based on the value of Trust. For a growing number of people no longer trust the offerings of the big. They want services and products that they can trust. Real soap - Real Food - Real anything. These businesses cannot scale traditionally and maintain their key advantage, trust. So they too have to learn how to scale using networks.

For many of us now know that the Big cannot make or offer Real.

Nor will they offer the jobs back. As the big get bigger, they have to shed labour. For in the machine model it is the only way to keep your ROI. You take the real out of your product and you replace your labour with a process of a cheaper source. There is no stopping this process. 

This is the future, just as the Ford Model was the future in 1905.

The Opportunity for the "New/Old Bank - Our banking system has evolved to match the Ford system. A new banking system will evolve to match the system that is itself emerging. 

We don't know how to evaluate this kind of tiny networked business by using the machine rules approach. But we did know how to do this in the past when we had local banking.

In 1900 most business was local and operated like this. They did not use the web to network but network they did. They used face to face locally. Banks developed extensive personal relationships not just with each person - as we talked about on the phone - but participated in the health of these local networks as well. Like a good gardener, they helped their local community get stronger

We used to know how to do this. But of course "it" does not scale if we use a machine/industrial model.

To meet the opportunity of the new market, we also have to discover how to scale this older process. How can we do this? We know that all natural systems are fractal. If we can design a tiny model based on network principles, we can have confidence that we can scale it.

The Pay Off - A Virtuous Cycle of Return - There is a systemic reason why Traditional Banks fail - There will be a systemic reason why a network model will prevent this Ford Banks end up taking on too much risk.One of the reasons why Banks take too much risk is that as they grow, the pressure on the ROI grows too. This is not corporate stupidity but an outcome of the design. In the model, the structural expenses grow in lockstep with assets. All resources have to be purchased. So when earnings get squeezed, they have to take more risk to keep up the ROI. By taking on riskier assets, they lower the threshold for default and so increase the future risk of pressure on earnings and capital. It's a vicious circle. For a while, this can be offset by scale. Hence more mergers. But in the end, there is no where to offset the risk and all the costs are locked in. Today all the big banks own too big a chunk of the risk. This is where we are in Europe. There is no where to run anymore.

But in a real network, most of the resources are attracted in for free. Look at Visa or Interac. If we use a real network, we can find ways of scaling that breaks this connection between structural costs and assets. In a real network, the resources and revenues scale exponentially while direct costs scale at a modest linear rate. Nearly all the value in a network is not on any members balance sheet. As the total network value scales, so each member gets more value. We can see this in staffing. Back in 1995 Visa had 3,000 employees and B of A had a 100,000. Visa did a vast multiple of transactions to B of A. B of A now has 300,000 employees and is laying off 30,000 in a vain attempt to get its costs in line with its revenues.

The OpportunityJust as the Ford Model replaced the local artisan model and was adopted by every organization, so the network will do the same in our own time. It's evolution!

Raj on the Value of Nothing - Brilliance in 3 Minutes

 HT Charles Frith

This is the pathway to our future - we go this way or we go nowhere - and you only have to invest 3 minutes to hear the ultimate in coherence - a masterpiece of compression and story telling - I am aghast at how thoughtful he is.

Credit Unions as an alternative to Banks - John Lahey

I wonder if the Credit Unions are going to give banks a real challenge now? For many years, many Credit Unions tried to be banks.

But a number of them have gone back to basics - to deepen their understanding of the relationship with their owners.

It is with some joy that I hear today that an old colleague and friend, John Lahey has been appointed CEO of the Alterna Group. John is quite the best executive I have ever worked with and it bodes well that Alterna looked to him. Here is the ROB's take:

John Lahey spent his career promoting big banks. Now, he's out to turn their weaknesses against them.

The Alterna Group, which includes one of Canada's oldest and largest credit unions, Alterna Savings, is expected to announce today that Mr. Lahey will become its next chief executive officer, effective July 9. Mr. Lahey, who worked for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce for close to a quarter of a century before becoming CEO of FirstOntario Credit Union, will split his time between the Toronto and Ottawa offices of Alterna, which has more than 150,000 members in Ontario.

By the time he left CIBC six years ago, he had been responsible for 1,350 domestic branches and was well versed in the challenges of retail and small business banking. Now Mr. Lahey is working on strategies to help credit unions compete against his former employer and the other mammoth banks that dominate Canada's financial service sector.

"One of the challenges with the banks, because they're so large, their offers are often mass-market offers," Mr. Lahey said in a recent interview. "It's like Henry Ford: you can have any colour you want as long as it's black. Because they're large, and because their volumes are so horrendous, they standardize everything. I think the huge advantage that credit unions have is to personalize what they do."

If anyone can do this - it will be John

CIBC and Banks - Lesson from the Marines - Dr Jonathan Shay

The recent class action suit against CIBC by one of their star tellers about overtime is I believe only superficially about pay. I argued in my prior post that it is really about how oppressed and voiceless the staff feel in an operational culture that treats staff and clients as atomistic and replaceable individual objects.

I said that I would use the Marine Corps to refute this approach to organization. I will be quoting from an important paper written by Jonathan Shay - talking about the idea of "Cohesion" in the USMC. I attach his paper at the end of this post. His thoughts are very close to mine that I have talked before about in my series on what is a "Human organization.". See the follow on for more on Dr Shay - a great story in itself.

Staff at CIBC are treated as individuals who do not need to be fitted into a social unit where they feel safe and appreciated. They are lead by spreadsheet jockeys who do not share their risks, who may know less than them and who rely on their official status for power. They have an existence of unending routine where the goals are not linked to growing something over time but merely to a set of numbers.

I don't mean to just pick out CIBC - most organizations are like this now. It's just at CIBC that the price for this approach is going to be paid.

This is the machine model. Like all machine models, as it scales so does the friction leading to a point where the organization has to seize up - the point of diminishing returns.

This mechanistic idea is behind much of the weakness of the current US Military model.

In an Army version of this belief [voiced to me (Shay) at a Research and Development Corporation (RAND) personnel seminar] an Army colonel said, “I had a tank company in Germany, and you get a new guy, you want to put him in a tank knowing he’s been trained at Ft. Knox on this same tank.  You put him in there and he’ll fight the tank, because he knows what to do.”

This is the late 19th century theory of Management Science known as Taylorism.  It had enormous cultural prestige at the beginning of the 20th century when Secretary of War Elihu Root imported it into the War Department, formerly a corporation lawyer for the Pennsylvania Railroad.  In the course of the 20th century, this theory has become deeply entrenched in the common sense and the institutional policies and procedures of the American forces.  By mid-century it led ultimately to policies and practices of manning units individual by individual, and providing rotation and rest and relaxation (R&R) by individual.  Taken as a whole, this body of practices is known as the individual replacement system.  For many Americans on active duty, this is so familiar and seems so natural that it is as invisible as water is to a fish.  An Army officer once looked me in the eye and said, “It’s not possible to do it any other way.”

Almost since its inception in the first quarter of the last century, and especially after every war, American battle leaders in all services have contested the individual replacement system as a very bad fit to what’s needed for fighting other human beings.

The trouble is that they have never fully embraced its alternative - situating people in tight cohesive stable small units and having a leadership that leads from the front.

What can small stable units do that individuals cannot?

General Donn Starry, United States Army (USA), retired, considered by many to be the father of the Abrams Tank, is fond of telling a story about superb tank gunnery he witnessed in Israel.  He says he asked, “So how many rounds do you fire every year to get to shoot like that?” expecting the Israeli tanker to answer in the hundreds.  He reports his own amazement when the answer came back, “Oh, maybe six or eight.”  And then noting General Starry’s astonishment, his informant said, “but remember that we’ve been together in this tank and the ones before it for fifteen years!” 

As any coach knows, a team of experts, will often lose to a real team.

A real team also has great situational awareness. They don't lose any energy wondering what the other guy is doing not do they fear taking risks as they know they will be supported.

OBSERVATION: Members of cohesive units are able to take in the environment and focus on the enemy, because they know that others in the unit are covering their backs.  No cognitive or motivational resources are wasted in worries about the incompetence, selfishness, or lack of commitment of peers.  Leaders (and this applies equally to field grade and company grade officers) experience a similar freeing up of resources when they know their bosses trust and support them.  They can focus outward on the enemy, rather than focus inward on pleasing the boss, on looking good, or on institutional structures, politics, and procedures. 

ORIENTATION: Because solidarity suppresses fear of the enemy, Marines are able to think.  We must root out the folk culture that assumes that the lowest ranks not only can’t think but shouldn’t.  Intelligent observation and thoughtful interpretation of the things seen, heard, and smelled must be cherished at every rank.  Every rifleman should be as skillful a tactician for the fifty meters directly in front of him as his battalion Commanding Officer (CO) should be for the 5,000 meters ahead of him.  When cohesion is absent, mistrust of peers, of subordinates, of superiors clouds the mind with fear at every echelon even when the enemy is not especially dangerous.  Properly supported leaders are able to think, plan, and organize (based on mission and what the enemy is doing) far better than leaders living in a “zero defects,” climate of document-it-all-to-prove-you’re-not-to-blame-because-you-were-following-orders-or-the-school-solution.  Supported leaders don’t bleed energy and attention into ***-covering (expletive deleted); they are not tyrannized by school solutions; they don’t waste their energy trying to discover imperceptible clues to what would please the boss.

DECISION:  Empowering the echelon on the ground in direct contact with the situation entrusts them to make decisions in accordance with the commander’s intent – there is no “waiting for orders.”  A “strategic corporal” who is not sure of his people – because he hardly knows them and has no history with them of coming through hard things together – is far less likely to take initiative and make decisions based on commander’s intent.  He is far more likely to buck the decision up the chain of command.

ACTION: Decisions stick when they are owned by cohesive units: no foot-dragging, sabotage, or Lone Rangerism.  Execution carries full commitment by all because of their real training experiences together. Confident execution.

Because cohesion is a condition of mutual trust and confidence based on concrete familiarity, it frees cognitive and motivational resources for every step in the OODA cycle, improving their quality, and speeding them up.  This is true for every echelon from Marine fire team to Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) commander.

Putting the individual into a stable small social unit has the power to shift your organizational gear way beyond the machine.

The other critical ingredient - real leadership - not the white hard hat, not the manager in the corner with a spreadsheet. We are talking Centurions, Royal Navy Frigate Captains, Fire Chief leaders here. People whose experience and actions build trust. Shay asks the USMC if the young marine officers meet this criteria:

Knows his stuff – Do TBS and IOC prepare the young lieutenant to be a life-long learner of the art of ground warfare? ready to learn from their NCOs? ready to learn from experimentation? ready to seek out mentoring wherever they can find it?  Or do they create the illusion that the checklist school solution is the final and complete answer?

Knows his people – Do we give our young lieutenants enough time with their platoons to get to know their people? Enough time to develop a warm heart for their subordinates and to protect them? 

Knows that his boss is dedicated to his success, and will not abandon him – Do our officer evaluation practices elevate fault-finding above mentoring, teaching, and supporting? 

Does CIBC or the Banks your organization pass this test?

I think that there is more to the idea of Enterprise 2.0 than social software and hype. I think that there is one way that nature designed for humans to work together well. Just as there is one design for a wolf pack. One design for an oak forest. One design for a galaxy. We have just forgotten it and replaced it with a simplistic dogma.

Those who want real performance will start to explore this lost knowledge. If you are interested in how to make your organization perform - I have more on my page at reboot9. There I put forward the truths of this ancient and still visible natural system for humans.

Download cohesion.doc

Banks - The Limits of the Efficiency Model - Class Action Suit by Star Teller

A star teller with many years of experience and in the lead role at main branch is the initiator of a class action suit against CIBC for unpaid overtime.

What is really going on? Is it really a matter of pay or is there a deeper issue? I think that it is a sign that CIBC and the banks are reaching the limits of running banks like a machine and that it is now time to think about how by looking at the model of a truly "Human Work Place" they could heal this wound and also get the performance that they desire

TORONTO (CP) - In what's being called a potentially precedent-setting case in Canada, a bank teller has taken on one of the country's biggest financial institutions with a class-action lawsuit that alleges CIBC fails to pay overtime to its customer service staff.

Dara Fresco said Tuesday that she's owed some $50,000 for the two-and-a-half to 15 hours a week of additional work she says she's been required to perform as a teller and personal banker since 1998.

The 34-year-old Toronto woman, who has worked at more than a dozen CIBC branches, points out that's a lot more than her current annual salary of $30,715.

I've been working for the bank for almost 10 years and I figured enough is enough already. I wanted to get paid for the overtime," Fresco said at a news conference Tuesday, just hours after the lawsuit was filed in Ontario Superior Court.

The $600-million class-action suit is expected to cover an estimated 10,000 current and former non-management, non-unionized CIBC employees across Canada, many of whom are women.

"What is unfair is that my colleagues and I are rarely being paid for the overtime that we are working, and that's just not right," Fresco alleged.

"I decided to seek out legal advice to see, mainly, if this was allowed and to find out what my options were ... because it isn't fair to work and not be paid for your time."

I don't think that this issue is really about pay. I worked for CIBC for many years and for the last 5 was SVP for HR. This issue is about managerial culture and the relationship between the staff and the bank's  senior leadership

In the decades that I was at Wood Gundy and then at CIBC, we knew that sales were key but we knew that the key to sales was relationship. But in the last 10 years only one thing now counts - sales. Everyone now has a set of targets, ever expanding, that they have to make. CIBC retail has become a machine. The client is there to be farmed. The business, the clients and the staff have all become commodities.

As CIBC has become a machine, the people who feel the most alienated are paradoxically the stars. Every milestone passed leads to another hurdle. Life just becomes a treadmill.  Key staff feel like Sisyphus, who as a curse was forced by the Greek Gods to roll a boulder up a hill - every day. Their reward for achievement - another boulder. The claim is that they get paid for success - but the amounts are paltry compared to investment bankers.

They feel unappreciated. They feel that they are treated like things. They feel that no one cares about the clients either. They are not people anymore they are leads or they have yield. It's all about the numbers.

I come to my point - in medical malpractice - the key to being sued is not the malpractice but the nature of the relationship.

Many malpractice suits are brought not because of mal-practice nor even because of complaints about the quality of medical care but as an expression of anger about some aspect of patient-doctor relationships and communications.

The theory presented is that under the stress of anxiety and physical illness, some patients regress to childhood needs; physicians are not generally trained to fill such needs. Thus, these patients, angry because of this, express their anger in malpractice suits. This theory has been taught to physicians and medical students as part of a physician continuing medical education (CME) seminar on Loss Prevention/Risk Management through demonstration of active-listening techniques to seminar participants.

Physicians who understand and can respond appropriately to the emotional needs of their patients are less likely to be sued. This may also translate into a more fulfilled practice of medicine by those physicians who are most aware of the importance of a positive relationship. (My emphasis)

My advice to my old place CIBC is to look beyond the obvious and look to your culture.

There is more performance and less friction available in a more human model. I will write more about this in the next few days. I will be using examples from a very tough organization - the US Marine Corps!