Welcome to the new frontier. It’s fast. It’s unforgiving. And it just changed the rules of your business without asking for permission.
AI isn’t the threat. Stale thinking is.
In this video, Roxanne Emmerich takes off the gloves and exposes what no banker wants to admit: most teams are built for a world that no longer exists.
You’ll discover:
If you don’t teach your people how to think in second and third orders, you’re complicit in their extinction.
This is not about getting ahead. This is about not being left behind.
Watch now.
It’s an AI wild, wild West, and everything is happening fast. And most banks have no idea how to get aligned.
I’ve been mentioning to my bank executives to make sure that they’re getting their team prepared because we’re moving into a world of wisdom workers. So if you put something into ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever tool you’re using, but you don’t bring wisdom to it, what you get out of it is a bunch of junk. And so now, the highest performers are those with the most wisdom.
Brian Tracy used to talk about how anybody who read eight or ten—I can’t remember the exact number—books in their area of specialty would become a top one percent performer in that industry because they would become masters of the knowledge.
This is the world where you need wisdom workers.
I have to share with you—I’m quite concerned about most people who work in banks right now who are transactional thinkers and transactional executors, because most of those jobs will be much more quickly and better done by machinery in the very near future. So where are these people going to go?
It is your ethical obligation to teach your people how to remain employable in a world where they will have to become wisdom workers to be able to make that improvement.
So in this world, we have to move from being that first-order thinking to second-order thinking—people who can see around corners, anticipate what’s going wrong, people who bring wisdom and understand what are the very best ways to do it. How is it changing based on what’s happening?
It’s a different world. It’s exciting.
We’re living in a world where Saudi Arabia is coming in and investing in the United States, where interest rates are changing by the minute. Gold prices are moving in directions beyond our understanding.
Bond portfolios are going through all kinds of crazy. It’s just not the world it was.
And we’re going to need to learn to be excited by the changes and be able to be mobile, to move quickly—because hanging on to yearly strategic planning—and please tell me you don’t do yearly strategic planning but that you do quarterly planning—but anybody who’s sticking to the yearly plan will certainly become dust, because eleven or twelve months after you’ve created that thinking, the world has already changed.
In fact, the way the world’s working now, it takes about a week.
And that’s where AI—and the ability to think in second-order—will come in.
So, as executives and board members of top-performing banks, you must be leaders in helping your team know how to work with AI, develop their next-level thinking, bring wisdom into their understanding, and really elevate these people to make sure that they can run AI—not be run out by AI.
Can you give them what they need to succeed? Not unless you’ve created a franchisable system to help them duplicate your success.
Here are the seven crucial elements of building a franchisable system in your own bank:
The coming bank consolidation isn’t a surprise. It’s been predicted for years. In fact, the next 18 months are destined to be a major “shake out” period when weak banks will be acquired or closed—and banks that are in a position to capture the best customers in town will become stronger and more profitable.
Culture asks, “Will your people leap over tall buildings in a single bound to make sure your client is successful in their business or personal financial goals?” “Will you go beyond bank “product” to create Unique Selling Propositions that rock their world and cause hundreds of thousands of dollars of impact for them? And will your people have fun doing it so that your system is sustainable?
Ready to stop wasting your marketing dollars and grow your profits and safety with a predictable model of organic growth of top and bottom lines?
Thousands of bank executives are waking up to 2013 saying, “SALES training! Of course! It’s SALES training we need.”
Yeah, well sometimes the first thing that pops into our heads isn’t a keeper. Sales training is fine, but it’s NOT what you need to solve your problem and create a sustainable solution.
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...
Growing a bank isn’t some mysterious process that involves tea leaves and oracles. It’s more like building a house or tuning up a car’s engine, with a power tool for every step and a hand tool for every part you need to work on. Effective builders have a “franchise system”—the proven best way to do things that minimizes mistakes and maximizes results per hour spent.
The process begins with one crucial step: Find out what matters to your best customers, then build hundreds of Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) around those components and list them explicitly in your marketing materials.
Most banks focus on what they should do. That’s a good thing. But too few seriously evaluate what they are currently doing that has to stop. Awareness of the common characteristics of low-performing banks can keep you from falling victim to any of these practices before you join the group.
Let’s start with the first four:
Let’s face facts. You know it is true. Banks stink at sales culture.
Most say they’re working on it…but most have been “working on it” for three decades now