LONDON — I talked to an M&A banker on the weekend.  Made me think of my time at high school dances.  Always standing on the wall, trying to look cool.  But never out on the actual dance floor.

The merger and acquisition market is a bit quiet at the moment.  And amen to that.  We’re busy enough without it.  Businesses are — rightly — taking advantage of the quiet and their own peaceful progress, to transform their operations.

We’re working on big “transformation” programmes on several continents and in a diversity of sectors.  Change management is in high demand.  And that’s good.

But M&A will be back.  My friend should be up frugging, ‘cutting some rug’ and doing The Hustle by Q2 at the latest.

Transformation is the powder room before the ball.

That’s my prediction.

Watch this space.

/df

CHELSEA — The problem with change is that you cannot always foresee what might happen next.  So you create an anticipated direction of travel and risks, issues, dependencies etc. along the way.

That’s how it’s done.  In a nutshell.

The problem with Britain’s big banks though is not that they don’t know what might happen next.  They do, but they’re determined to fight against it.

It is clear when you compare the banking systems of, say, Canada, what the problems of the UK and US systems were.  You can’t really argue it.

As the Chancellor George Osborne has said:

Take the financial sector out of the equation and economic growth in the rest of the economy during recovery has actually been above its average rate of the last two decades.

In fact, the Office of National Statistics says that Britain’s banks are responsible for 1/3 of our national fall in output since 2008.

That’s not really all that funny.

According to many of the banks the recovery is too unclear for action to be taken now.  However, for all the lack of clarity they see around the recovery, the implications of further regulation do seem clear to them.

And they know that that change wouldn’t be good.

Which, of course, is total rubbish.

Change is good.

When it comes to further regulation… and ring-fencing of retail banking, for example… there can really be little argument.

Let’s get on with managing the change.

/df

PICCADILLY — I love summer weekends. There’s so much going on that for a brief period it feels like there’s more to life than work.

I’ve been running from pillar to post for 10 days. It’s amazing I am still upright. But Saturday I stood still long enough to soak up some chatter from some friends in the world’s biggest banks. I was symbolically depleting a lovely keg of Freedom lager at an American Independence Day BBQ,

These sour souls of finance have been telling me for months that things were actually much worse than we thought. “We haven’t seen the worst of it yet. No, no”, they’d cheered me up when I needed it most.

But the tune has changed now. We seem to have resumed regular service. “It looks like 2009 will be like 2007.” They said to each other with a wink and a happy smile.

They had tales of trying to hire people in an “extremely tight” bankers recruiting market. One had lost out a prospect when he/she had been offered more than three times their offer by a competitor.

I don’t know if this is good or bad. But I do remember someone saying last year that this recession would kill the UK because the banking sector was so important to the country’s economy.

Try communicating that.

/df

P.S. My friend Kevin Keohane (Publicis’ very own Emperor of Engagement) is wrestling with his Grade 12 economic theory on his blog here. Those of us who failed economics must be supportive.

ANOTHER TAXI IN KL — I am on my way to the airport. The circus is leaving town. In another 24 hours of lounges and airplanes I will be home.

It’s been a hugely rewarding experience. I have spent the last two days locked in a room with internal communications people from Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, and Indonesia. They came from different parts of their organisation: HR, Marketing, Brand, Corporate Comms. Some were PR people, some external affairs. One represented a bank that had just been through a 5-way merger. (No sense making things simple!)

There was a fellow from Brunei with amazing stories — but I’ll have to keep those to myself.

I threw everything I had at them. Before the course I took Paul through the materials and he said “that’s pretty much everything we know.” But my south-east Asian friends were unbowed. They are a force to be reckoned with.

I pointed them towards Melcrum and Simply and Ragan. I urged them to join IABC and even CIPR and CiB. I suggested some books and blogs and social media channels and I am sure they will get involved in all of them.

Today, on the morning of the second day we talked about multicultural communications and I was certain that I was unworthy. These were people who have been through more in their lives than I could do if I live three more times.

At one point I put up a chart from 2001 that mentioned some of their countries, and they said “2001! That’s old news. It’s totally changed since then.” And they are right.

Personally, I haven’t changed that much since 2001.

There’s more to come from this session. But these are first impressions.

I want to go back. I want to work in these countries more. Soon!

/df

TCR — Something quite amazing happened yesterday. Did you see it? No, it wasn’t the Blur concert. Or the Beckham’s nanny, or Tiger talking about Lefty’s wife.

Yesterday the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China met. They were in Yekaterinburg, of course. And their statement (in English!) is here.

Depending on who you ask they represent 15 to 22% of the global economy. That’s a lot. Especially for places you have never done business with.

They have more than 1/3 of the world’s population between them. Four countries!

They are estimated to also have as much as 40% of the world’s currency reserves. Which begs the question: do we know who owns our debt? Do we know who our real bankers and backers are?

And the answer is definitely No.

‘We are committed to advance the reform of international financial institutions, so as to reflect changes in the world economy.’

Yesterday’s news barely made the papers. It’s not on Internet search terms. And yet their statement at the end of the day caused the dollar to fall.

There’s a lot going on the world that we’re not paying enough attention to. the last few days in Iran have been monumental. Communication through mobiles and the Internet has undermined state controls, in a country where half the population is under 25.

Emerging markets — the BRIC’s and those like them — are coming to a neighbourhood near you. Look out your window, you can see them. It’s worth getting to know them before they have to come to you.

/df

My view is that they [the banks] are partly to blame and there are people who feel remorse about this.

– Sir Win Bischoff, chairman of Citigroup

[Note to Sir Win: Good use of the third person, impersonal. "We don't know who these people are, but, by Jove, I swear they are out there!"]

For this season, all the big names embrace the pale and interesting pout.

– Susannah Frankel, Fashion Columnist, The Independent

[Note to readers: Yes, I know. My juxtaposition is not subtle. But it is what I thought when I read it.]

NEXT! Resisting the ‘Press for Champagne’ button at the Soho It brasserie Bob Bob Richard.

– The Sunday Times’ Style Magazine, 04 January 2009

[Clearly someone didn't get the memo.]

/df

TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD — They’re all in a mess today. Citigroup was once my poster-child for what a global business could be. Now they’re borrowing more than the GDP of Oman.

Standard Chartered has long been a favourite because they bank neatly in places that need neat banking – India, Africa, Asia. But they’re in trouble too.

And Barclays are allowed to enjoy 15 minutes of the old hubris that we expect of our banks, as they get a bail-out from just along the coast in Qatar.

Even LloydsTSB and HBoS are all over the papers. How much did those weekend full page ads targeting shareholders cost? (Here I naively thought that companies had mailing lists for their shareholders…)

And then there’s HSBC‘s Chairman calling for a better values approach to banking. Which sounds great. Here we’d thought banking was just about “value”. Nonetheless it does seem like Mr Green is preaching to the life boats from the highest piece of dry land.

Why do I like these banks so much? Why am I so positive about their future?

Clever banks, with good internal communications, can change everything virtually over-night. Banks do not have assembly line to reassemble. They do not have products to go through R&D. They don’t have to find new holes in the ground or wait for the sun to shine. They just ‘do’ things.

With a capacity for change management and good internal communications — and strong values — they can do anything they like. In an instant.

And the clever ones will.

Sadly, I suppose, of all the banks I have worked with, the Nationwide Building Society is probably the best at this…

Hmm. Maybe there’s… Nah.

/df