A retailer near the town I live in recently gave me some advice about sharing knowledge with others. Someone who keeps knowledge of a subject to himself, he said, is like a glass that's filled with water and left sitting around for a long time. "It becomes stale," he pointed out. When a glass is emptied and refilled frequently, the water is fresher.
Emptying the glass, in his analogy, was letting go of the things you know, your preconceived notions, as well as passing along your lessons learned to others. Refilling the glass is listening to other people and being willing to try out their ideas and approaches to things, even if they're people one hasn't looked up to in the past or people in industries or lives different from one's own.
You see both sides of this in the banking industry.
There are banks and executives within them who believe everything they do is a hyper-important state secret that must be closely guarded at all times, even when what they're doing is not extraordinary or even interesting, they're just deploying commonly used technology. You don't get much thought leadership or collaboration from such firms. They may not leak intellectual capital, but sooner or later the thinking within the company turns ingrown and stale.
Then there are leaders and banks like John Petrey at First Niagara, who are willing to share knowledge, ideas and approaches to common challenges with their peers in the industry. Such people and institutions benefit from the dialogues they open, learning about best practices and outstanding technologies as they share from their store of intellectual capital. At our CIO Summit in June, a roomful of such open-minded CIOs bounced ideas and technology success stories off each other and shared their internal struggles and frustrations. Everyone, I think, walked out of the room that day with a new idea or a new way of looking at something.
At the BAI Retail Delivery conference in October in Chicago, again we saw and heard bankers sharing tips and strategies with each other about how to deal with shared difficulties such as the banking industry's reputation problem and how to keep up with consumers' rapidly changing needs. We witnessed some schadenfreude among smaller community banks and credit unions who see an opportunity to win new customers among discredited big banks.
In addition to our profile of Petrey's merger integration work at acquisition-hungry First Niagara and our highlights from the BAI Retail Delivery show, this month we share new approaches to assessing borrower creditworthiness and new types of virtual currency that may some day enter the mainstream. We tell about Royal Bank America in Narberth, Pa., which has given its two overworked IT people new help desk software that's helping them respond to problems. And we relate how Soctiabank has automated the way it produces sales reports to save time and reduce errors.
