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(gentle music)
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Dave, thank you for joining us today.
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I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
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It's great to be back.
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Thanks for inviting me.
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You inherited a very high-performing organization.
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What were the priorities you set?
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How did you deliberately step into taking this organization
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to the next level?
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First I had to reposition our core assets.
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We had some great assets.
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We had some outstanding assets.
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But we were under-invested in the United States.
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We didn't have enough of a growth mindset.
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We didn't have a growth platform, so we repositioned
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some assets out and we made a large acquisition
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in the United States.
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I think that provided a growth platform-
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into US wealth management that we are very excited about.
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The second one, I called it Vision 2025,
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was we had to reimagine what it was gonna be
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to be a mass consumer and commercial bank in the future
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with the platform effects coming in,
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with the disruptive nature, with a digital consumer
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that you need to connect to.
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And the third core piece of what I thought I needed
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to focus on was a cultural transformation.
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So, Dave, let's go back three years from today,
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to fall of 2016.
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You took the decision to take on
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a major company cultural transformation.
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Can you talk a little bit about what was behind that,
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and that approach?
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It was a period of time where we were very successful.
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When you examine all the reasons we were successful,
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my concern was, I wasn't sure it was sustainable.
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The drivers that had been our success in the past,
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I didn't think were the same drivers that we needed
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to be successful in the future.
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I felt we needed more ambition, we need urgency,
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and we needed vision to take on more and therefore went
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through a change in the organization to liberate capacity,
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to bring in new leaders with a different mindset.
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We needed new hard skills.
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Now, three years later, what's been the lasting impact?
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We've unlocked a new group of leaders in the organization.
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We've introduced a new leadership model where we ask leaders
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in clear language to set more ambitious goals,
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to lead in a more ambitious way, to articulate,
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to be even more fallible, to say we're not gonna get it
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all right, and allow the space to fail.
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What I'm maybe most proud of, is we used this opportunity
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to do a complete reset on diversity and inclusion
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in the organization.
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And of the senior roles that we replaced,
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50% or more went to females.
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And for us, it was a tangible demonstration of a reset
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on diversity and inclusion.
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When you look at our TSR, you look at our client
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satisfaction results have never been better,
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record client satisfaction results, all our core metrics
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have benefited from the result of going
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through this transformation.
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How were you able to cross that gap between knowing
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culture's important and actually doing something about it?
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I think part of the success factor was,
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you shock the organization when you stop it and say
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we're gonna go through a change that involves 800 employees
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potentially leaving, and employees do stop and listen.
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Whoa, this is not the same day to day noise.
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This is a fundamental transformation.
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Why are we doing this?
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What's the purpose?
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If we had tried to do this by just talking about leadership
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models and everybody's running as hard as they can
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to make customer plans, serve customers, build technology,
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all the things we do, it gets lost in the noise.
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What advice would you give other CEOs that know
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culture's something they need to deal with, yet day to day,
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the operational and strategic just seem to crowd out
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dealing with it?
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You have to be able to write it down on half a piece
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of paper, then have someone read it, and you can explain it
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to someone who doesn't know your company.
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I think that's part of it, right?
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The magic of the leadership model was,
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you could read three columns of information and knew exactly
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what we wanted from you.
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It was simple, it was brilliant in its design,
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and was easy to communicate.
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That's that plain language, that design.
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It made a massive difference 'cause someone could take it
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on their own in a train or at home or read it at their desk,
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and they knew what we wanted.
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If it's so complex that it takes management to explain it
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over and over again, then you're not gonna get traction.
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Evidently, the context for banks globally is changing.
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There are a lot of headwinds.
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The environment is getting tougher.
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How do you look at these forces?
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What are the major forces that you think you need
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to particularly prepare for?
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Our role as an intermediary is changing in senior markets,
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so we have a whole set of challenges there that
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we're dealing with and we have a very creative team
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on both the markets and investment banking side that's
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repositioning our business.
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You go to the other end of the scale,
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you look at the challenges that the retail, consumer,
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commercial bank are facing, and they're just as fundamental,
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but it's the platform challenge.
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It's a model that relied on us being an intermediary
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around moving cash in society, distributing cash,
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and having branches on every corner and having vaults
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in branches so we could store and move cash,
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ATMs and the telephone banking,
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and then digital banking.
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And all that revolved around us being at the center
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of a customer's life.
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We're moving from a world where we had dominion
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over client needs and we had the centricity of building
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the rails to the economy to a world where the customers
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broadcast to the world, living in very different platforms,
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and our challenge as an industry, and for us
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idiosyncratically is to connect in a relevant way
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to a new digital customer living in a very different world.
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What do you have to get absolutely right as the head
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of RBC over the years to come?
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One of the challenges every CEO has in leading in this
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environment is balancing the short term and the long term.
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We call it the CEO's dilemma.
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How much performance do you give the market in the short term
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and how much do you use to build and transform
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your organization to be here for the next 100 years.
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I always say, you attract the investors you ask for
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in how you communicate with the marketplace,
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and I think it's really incumbent on CEOs to be very clear
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on how they plan to make that balance, and be very open
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about where the journey's going.
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Dave, thanks for coming.
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It's great to see you again.
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Well, it's great to catch up,
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and thanks for your partnership and support
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through this exciting journey we've had.