Many, many people spent a busy weekend hammering out the details of the government rescue of Citigroup that was announced last night. The rescue clearly is a Portentous Event, so I went searching this morning for insights about what the portents are portending.
I got as far as the third paragraph of the Wall Street Journal story, where it says Citigroup is “in 106 countries.”
“Oh yeah?” I thought. “Name them.”
Several years ago, around 2001, I was, briefly, among the world’s foremost experts on How Many Countries Citigroup Is In. I was part of the company’s employee communications team at the time, and someone higher on the food chain had gotten impatient with seeing vague references to Citigroup as being in “more than 100 countries” (which is how other news organizations are describing Citi today). I was tasked to track down the precise, official number of how many countries Citigroup is “in.”
Oh my goodness.
Let’s start with public sources. As of today (the numbers back then were probably slightly different), Citigroup.com lists precisely 100 countries. The 2007 Annual Report lists 97. Hmm…
OK, let’s look at internal websites. I’m no longer an employee, so I can’t view these sites now, let alone post links. But suffice it to say there were conflicting numbers and lists of countries on various intranet sites. The most popular numbers were something like 101 and 103.
I reported back to my betters that there appeared to be a good reason to cite “more than 100” countries. Now, if you’ve ever been a corporate gumby in a huge organization, you know how that was received: not good enough. “It’s a simple question, you ought to be able to track down a simple answer.”
There were at least two different keepers of what was described as the “official” number. I think one was the Corporate Secretary’s office (since they had to know where the company was incorporated), and the other was the global real estate department. So I got the two lists and compared them, expecting to find two additional countries on the larger list. Well, no… each list had a handful of countries not on the other list. I don’t remember which countries were on the bubble, but I came up with half a dozen questionable countries, and started trying to verify them one by one. It turns out that whether or not Citigroup is “in” a particular country is sometimes a matter of opinion.
Do you go by whether we have a subsidiary incorporated there, or whether there is a physical office vs. a mail drop, or whether we have employees domiciled there full-time? What if there are no longer any employees, but we’re still incorporated there? Does a joint venture count? When I talked to the various regional headquarters offices, sometimes they were unwilling to talk about whether we were actually “in” such and such a country, because of local political considerations. There were differences of opinion about when or whether the Country X office had closed.
Also, how do you define a “country”? Each list broke out Puerto Rico, for example, as a separate country. There is a logic to that, even though Puerto Rico is part of the United States, because there are important jurisdictional differences that affect companies doing business in Puerto Rico. Also, if you toss out Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, Macao, Hong Kong, Isle of Man and Jersey, all of a sudden you may no longer be able to say “more than 100 countries.” Heaven forfend.
Eventually, to get the poobahs off my back, I abandoned the search for Truth, picked one of the “official” numbers, and prepared to start defending it. I envisioned saying to anyone who challenged my number, “oh yeah? Here’s my list, let’s see your list. What’s that? You don’t even HAVE a list?” But I left the company before I had an actual opportunity to have that conversation.
The moral of the story: If you know how many countries your company is in, you’re not truly a global company.
All you gumbies and ex-gumbies out there — what’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever spent far too much time tracking down in corporate America?
Ah, the good ol’ days! -Andy
I spent several months at Citi attempting to formalize a definition of “account”. After a while, they took mercy on me and in my struggles and just let me decommission XPortico (in 105 countries, by the way)instead.
Good to hear from you, Andy.
Thanks for the comment, Geoff… but I’m not clear on what decommissioning Xportico (which a Google search tells me is a suite of web publishing tools) has to do with the definition of an account.
Stupidest thing by far – looking up all the buzz words in those press releases the dot com PR folks sent. Swear to you, I not-so-quickly became an expert in “robust, scalable, end-to-end user-friendly platform solutions that drive the mission critical functions of the corporate vision.” I will say the frustration of this new onslaught of jargon pushed me to torture one or two PR people – “Really? It does all that? Exactly what does that mean?” The deer-in-headlights stare they gave me was just the ice cream on top of the humble pie they’d just been served. Know what you’re writing, even if you’ve been told to write it against your will.
(insert maniacal laughter here)
I worked for the global side of Citi in reporting and they had specific tables which grouped our countries and regions and we had specific Customer tables which were used for aggregating Customer details. The customer is based on the legal address of the Customer and their is a table with the legal addresses of their subsidiaries. We were definitely in at least 100 countries on the corporate side and the consumer side was a little different in their structure, because it depends on their branch and Banking structure which has grown with many acquisitions.
Citigroup is a large organization, but it knows all of its customer and after 9/11, they are required to have demographic details on any customer that walks in to Citi. big or small and therefore these details are readily accessible for review.
The diparity on country list has a lot to do with management reporting which is quite complex in an organization like Citi, but it does not mean Citi does not know what countries they do business with.
These are tough times, let’s cut Citi a break.
Lori, if I ever have the need to send you a press release, remind me to scrub it first. 🙂 I actually was following that quote just fine until you got the word “vision,” the I felt my eyes rolling. Oh, and mission-critical should be hyphenated. (So should anal-retentive… at least when used as a compound adjective.)
Gio, thanks for taking time to comment. You are exactly right, management reporting is extremely complex in a global company with a quarter-million employees. I didn’t mean to imply that Citi doesn’t know where they do business — however many countries they are in, I know that there are individuals who are paying attention to business in each country. My point is that it was a waste of my reasonably-well-paid time to go to great lengths to determine whether the number should be 101 or 103 or whatever, when there is the option to just say “more than 100.”
109!
Believe me they not only know how many countries, they know how many people are in which buildings in each site in each country.