7 Secrets to Keep Your Acquisition from Going Over the Cliff
So you’ve decided to acquire another bank. For nearly 25 years, I’ve been giving the same advice about acquisitions: DON’T DO IT. I’ve had good reason to give that...
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Stop Letting Pedestrian Thinking Run Your Bank’s Future [VIDEO]
Most banks do not have an AI problem. They have a thinking problem.
In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich challenges bank executives to move beyond first-order thinking—the easy, obvious, defendable answer that rarely fixes the real issue. “We need sales, so let’s get sales training.” “We need deposits, so let’s hire a new head of retail.” Those are pedestrian solutions for a complex, fast-moving environment.
The banks that win the next era will be led by executives who force second-order thinking into the organization before AI accelerates bad assumptions, scattered activity, and expensive misfires.
In this video, you’ll discover:
- Why simple answers usually fail in complex banking environments
- How second-order thinking helps executives spot consequences before they become costly
- Why AI readiness starts with better executive thinking—not more training
If your team is resisting change, waiting for old roles to return, or chasing activity instead of strategy, this is the wake-up call. The future will not reward pedestrian thinking.
Watch now.
I have a book that I love that I read a couple times last year, and I continue to reference it often. It’s called Intelligent Thinking, which sounds like a pretty good thing to do. And on pages fifty-eight and fifty-nine, there’s the concept of first-order thinking and second-order thinking. And I think it’s important to understand as an executive to make sure that you are using the right thinking and make sure that you’re evolving your people to the right thinking.
Here’s how he defines it. First-order thinkers look for things that are simple, easy, defendable. But, unfortunately, the whole ecosystem we live in is not that simple. Rather, it’s a complex permutation and combination of various factors and their interaction at any given point in time.
Examples of that would be, “We need sales. Let’s get sales training.”
“We need to improve deposits. Let’s get a new head of retail.” First-order thinking, does it ever work?
Maybe one percent of the time. Second-order thinkers go way beyond the simple and look outside, extending to different parameters.
They go to second, third, and subsequent levels of probable consequences and think deeper.
Second-order thinkers think in terms of interactions amongst various factors, with attention to time and system-related aspects. They ask questions like, “What different factors or parameters are involved in this problem, and what’s the interaction? What could be different possible consequences of taking a particular action and analyzing each consequence? How do we leverage to speed up the solutions?”
Charlie Munger says it best when he talks about second-level thinking. He says, “It’s not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.”
Gotta love Charlie Munger. Right? I mean, the guy was one of the most brilliant business minds of our time. And here’s why I think this is an important concept for bank executives to be thinking of right now. In the world of AI, if you don’t have a second order of thinking guiding the direction of things, you will have a whole lot of activity that you find to be going in the wrong direction because everybody came up with their first-order thinking approach, and now suddenly it’s not working.
We have a crisis in the industry right now, and we have a small window of time to elevate the thinking to the next level of thinking. You don’t have a lot of time to figure this out. You gotta get moving here. So it’s not about training programs because training is teaching people what to do. It’s kind of like how to be a monkey. Right?
Education is teaching people how to be, how to think at a deeper level, how to go down deep, and to get rid of the pedestrian solutions and go for deeper-level thinking that actually solves the problems and, more importantly, takes advantage of the opportunities.
Stick with me as we talk about how you are going to take your team and get them ready for this new world of AI while they’re resisting and fighting and saying, “No way, not me. I want my old job,” when you know you cannot guarantee their old job because it’s just not going to continue to exist. Welcome to the world of second-order thinking.
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