The litmus test of the solidity of a ruling class lies in its ability to regulate succession processes. Anyone who has doubts about this statement must bear the burden of proof to the contrary after reading the pages and pages that Vilfredo Pareto dedicates to the continuation of the Venetian oligarchy in his Cours de Sociologie, written at the end of his very long life. Pareto's teaching, which is indelible for me, came back to me when I analyzed what is happening in France and Germany in the banking system in this regard.
On the one hand, Michel Pébereau announced at the shareholders' meeting of BNP Paribas on 11 May this year that he would resign as President on 2012 January XNUMX, to make way for the current director general, Baudouin Prot, from years his most faithful and trusted collaborator. And the latter, in turn, announced, again before the thousands of shareholders, that on the same date he would leave his position as general manager to the younger Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, who, after the arduous of Fortis, will have to continue along the complex but highly successful path of building the so-called "universal domestic bank".
Well: there is no doubt that information and control asymmetries are very wide in a large organization, but it is equally true that the right path for real government compliance, or rather for correct corporate governance, starts with the transparency of the mechanisms that regulate the cusp of organization. This allows all those who want to take advantage of the information to access the results achieved by individual managers and to form an opinion on the matter with time and calm assertiveness.
All this with the eloquent consequences that a similar self-control of succession processes has for the reputation on the markets and on the other economic entities with which one comes into contact, from suppliers to customers. All this, again, ensures an exceptional autonomy from any external pressure on the organization. Quite the opposite is what has been happening for months and months, and now with ever more harmful mass-media intensity, at the top of Deutsche Bank, where the succession path to Josef Ackerman is not only bumpy due to the constant postponements to which submitted and for the continuous leaks in proposed.
The nature of the conflict lies in the inability to maintain a prevailing and central corporate culture in the legitimacy processes of top management. And this in a bank that over the last twenty years has increasingly built its profits on Anglo-Saxon finance, rather than on the original Germanic world. Hence the conflict between the one chosen by Ackermann and all the other exponents of the highest managerial cohort. The sixty-three-year-old number one of the bank, about to leave, would like in his place Axel Weber, the controversial former German central banker who has just distinguished himself in a truly unusual conflict, for the Germanic tradition, with the Prime Minister of his country, giving resignation from the central institute before the deadline.
Deutsche Bank's controlling shareholders, on the other hand, would favor the most heterogeneous executive with respect to the bank's culture of origin: Anshu Jain, Indian by birth, New Yorker by training and born in Merrill Lynch, creator of the copious profits I mentioned. The conflict is tearing the bank apart. Aspects of national cultures that are revealed? Perhaps. There is no doubt that Germany, beyond its significant economic performance, is in a globalization and globalization crisis which it is culturally unable to cope with except with an uncomposed amalgam of opposing ideas and opinions. While La Douce France is, on the other hand, always proud of La Repubblique, much less sweet, and of the fact that the experience of the public civil servant (Pébereau docet) is always the best to guide any organization, whether economic or non-economic. But there must be a state with a legal-rational bureaucracy.
