Chief Executive of Citicorp from 1967 until his retirement in 1984, Walter Wriston stamped his brand of strong leadership on a well-established institution already known for a tradition of innovation and entrepreneurship. Wriston followed another powerful leader, George S. Moore, first as head of international banking and then as President of what was already the largest US commercial bank.

Moore (known as 'a man hell bent on doing things yesterday' [1]  and Wriston were committed as early as the 1950s to a vision of Citicorp (and its flagship bank Citibank) as a financial services company operating on a truly global basis. Their declared strategy was 'to be everywhere there is a chance to make a profit' [2] . Wriston describes its core strength as an overseas branch network 'in every major trading port in the world. Then we expanded to branches in the interior to create local currency. And we'd buy something if we couldn't get in with a branch.'

While the bank's financial record in pursuing this global vision has been erratic, Citicorp has largely achieved this ambitious goal with retail and corporate banking businesses in roughly 90 countries around the world operating under the slogan 'anywhere, any time, any way'. While Wriston shares responsibility for Citicorp's achievements--and its failures--with his predecessor Moore, his deputy William Spencer and the management team under John Reed which succeeded him, his personal approach to leadership still characterises the Citicorp culture more than a decade after his retirement.

For Wriston, leadership is having a firm direction which is understood by all:

The first thing is to know where you are going. Then you have to frame it in a way which is readily understood by all. Jack Welch [of General Electric] put this into practice with his famous targets of being first or second in a business, or to fix it, sell it, or liquidate it. You need a simple, consistent statement of where you are going. Ronald Reagan never deviated from his programme of cutting taxes, deregulating, and building the armed forces. At Citibank, we used similar slogans: 'earn a million dollars a day' or 'achieve 15 per cent earnings growth'. [Federal Reserve Board Governor] Arthur Burns criticised us for having an earnings target, but my answer was that otherwise Merrill Lynch's customers would have no reason to buy our stock.

We had some basic tenets: a global perspective, awareness of the growth of the middle class, and the realisation that a people-intensive delivery system was yesterday's game. But we also had some ideas that didn't work. We saw personal lending becoming a big business and decided to introduce our own card--the Everything Card--but threw it away when we realised that the guy pumping gas in Cincinnati would not recognise it, and thus it had no value to a customer. He knew what he wanted, and it was Visa or Mastercard, so we joined.

[1] Harold Cleveland and Thomas Huertas, Citibank: 1812-1970, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1985): 179.

[2] Harold Cleveland and Thomas Huertas, Citibank: 1812-1970, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1985): 262.