One question we would like to ask of Management Experts is : whaaat is this obsession with size yaar? Down-size, up-size, right-size, wrong-size, re-size…? The larger, the better- biger phetish? Are we megalomaniacs Isaaayyyy….?
Being bankers, let’s talk about Banks. There is a Bank with a loan + investment book of 1000 crores, with deposits 950 crore, and capital, 50. There is a loaning opportunity of 500 crore, and the Bank raises deposits of corresponding amount. Forget SLR-VESSLR. Has the Bank become 1.5 times the earlier size? Manpower same to same.
When the merger of a public sector bank, Chabiwala Bank no. 7, with its parent happened in 2008, the balance sheet of the vanquished Bank on merger eve, halved, Bank wooooshing around like a pricked balloon, as the Bank jettisoned both loans and deposits. Does it mean that the size of the bank halved in 6 months?
Build larger Banks, they say. Will a gaggle of ten banks together, with a business of 100 crores each, and capital adequacy ratio (capital funds to asset ratio, in general terms) of 10%, be smaller, mince will the gaggle be smaller than an entity formed by their absolute merger? Sum of parts less than the whole- can you be sure?
That neat little nursery rhyme sums it all:
If all the trees were one tree,What a great tree that would be!
If all the axes were one axe,What a great axe that would be!
If all the men were one man,What a great man he would be!
And if the great man took the great axe,And cut down the great tree,
And let it fall into the great sea,What a great splish-splash that would be!
Remember a Bank called Lehman Brothers? An Investment Bank called Barings? An energy major called Enron? Big daddies all. Huwe naamwar benishaan kaise kaiise..?
Abraham Lincoln had ‘inordinately’ long legs. Mince high leg/torso ratio, say around 10:1 ha,ha,ha! A press reporter is bent upon embarrassing old Abe. How long should one’s legs be, President, he asks. The reply is –just enough to reach the ground! That’s what the size of an organization do- reach the ground! Not stay in the air!
We recommend you read that classic “On Being the Right Size” by JBS Haldane.
Of course, “Being the Right Size” does not refer to Firms or Banks persayyyy , but like all classic, its applicability is universal. Here Haldane points out some possible handicaps of size.
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| GIANT PAGAN |
To turn to zoology, suppose that a gazelle, a graceful little creature with long thin legs, is to become large; it will break its bones unless it does one of two things. It may make its legs short and thick, like the rhinoceros, so that every pound of weight has still about the same area of bone to support it. Or it can compress its body and stretch out its legs obliquely to gain stability, like the giraffe. I mention these two beasts because they happen to belong to the same order as the gazelle, and both are quite successful mechanically, being remarkably fast runners.
To return to organisations, naturally various factors will affect the performance of a ‘system’. Why mechanically relate it to size? Size could be, in cases, the sole dispenser and arbiter, for instance, in the case of a collapsing star or nuclear fission. The latter is simpler to understand. The core of a fission based atom bomb would most likely be Plutonium or Uranium 235. Atoms of both the elements have a peculiarity, a propensity to lose neutrons. When a neutron gets released from the atomic orbit, it may either (i) pass through the inter-atomic spaces and escape from the mass, or (ii) it may hit an atom’s core and in billiard fashion, trigger off further exodus- the so-called ‘chain-reaction’. Supposing we start from Plutonium the size of a marble, probably the neutrons will mostly leak out. If one adds more and more Plutonium to the marble, as if enlarging a plasticine ball, a stage comes when the neutrons get internally trapped and then the mass is ripe for the explosion. This ripe mass is called the ‘critical mass’. In practice, the same effect is achieved using a TNT implosion to bring together small bits of the element together resulting in a critical mass.
Fortunately or unfortunately, organizational effectiveness is not a sole function of size or mass. Incidentally, some experts liken the chain-reaction to the communication process in an organization. Below a critical mass, the message tends to ‘leak out’. In a larger organization, the neutrons may get lost, if the radioactivity is not high enough.
Size impacts the organisation but the strength of this factor would also depend upon social culture, geography, communication, social diversity etc. etc. of both the firm and its environment. What applies in the West need not automatically be applicable to us, ipso facto. For example, in the case of the Indian provinces, smaller states within which linguistic or cultural uniformity prevails, are seen to be more effective and successful. Hence the tendency for our states to get smaller and smaller, and more efficient. A large organisation, say a bank patterned on the Indian polity, would be an organisation with a number of autonomous units in it, with only some functions with the Head Office. It would be more or less like the ‘Holding Company Model’ RBI roots for. RBI officials feel that too large a bank will be a systemic risk-like placing all eggs in one basket.
So, apart from size, there will be other factors, and the impact of size could be difficult to isolate. But keeping other factors constant (ceteris paribus) the impact of size could mota-moti be possibly as under:
Eₒ= K*x-[x²] ©
Where Eₒ= organizational effectiveness
x stands for size
K is a constant.
© indicates that the formula is the copyright of Aeronsystems.com. The formula does not profess to be a mathematical model, does not claim to have any use (as x does not have any unit and is simply an orphan) and is strictly a case of groping in the dark or good clean fun depending on whether or not you hate PJs. Formula simply says that upto a point, the size may be an asset, and beyond, the deluge, he,he,he!
If K =100, the graphical representation is as under:
The idea that with higher capital a bank can court bigger exposures and tap huge opportunity may cut both ways. It assumes that the efficiencies of the bank and its staff are scalable- they will go up proportionately with size, or may be exponentially. Like the Marathi proverb, which says that a man sitting on a camel must be wiser than one on the ground- Unttawarcha Shahana. Human greed being what it is, a larger bank may spread a bigger contagion and require bigger bail-outs as happened in the US. The largest banks fell prey to ‘Sub-prime Crisis’ which, had it been committed by a junior Branch Manager, a jemdya, would have been called ‘stupid’ and the episode would not have been couched in such sexy words. We have now anointed the term.
There is lot of literature on the net, questioning and critiquing the size fetish, some of it on top websites. The following excerpts are taken from an article by Robert G. Wilmers, Chairman and CEO, M&T Bank Corp. (MTB) writing on Bloomberg’s:
Community Banks have given way to big banks and excessive industry concentration; profits are increasingly driven by risky trading; leverage is taking precedence over prudent lending; compensation is out of control. This toxic combination leads to continued taxpayer risk and threatens long- term U.S. prosperity.
To understand the change, first consider history. Banking once was a community-based enterprise, relying on local knowledge to guide the process of gathering customer deposits and extending credit. Done well, this arrangement ensures that deposits are deployed into a diversified pool of investments, while providing depositors with liquidity and a return on their savings.
Over the past generation, however, the financial services industry changed dramatically. In 1990, the six largest financial institutions accounted for 9 percent of all U.S. domestic deposits. As of Dec. 31, 2010, the six biggest banks accounted for 36 percent of deposits.
Such concentration raises the concern that poor decisions at such outsized institutions can lead to systemic risk.
If there is a lesson in the above passage, in the case of Chabiwala Bank, in adopting the BPR systems, the strengths of ‘Community Banking’ which were inherent in our Branch-banking got dissipated. What a waste of this precious life-giving fluid! Lack of Community feeling wonly leads to higher NPAs. We threw away the baby with the bathwater and paid through our nose to be screwed….
However principally, the talked about decline of Chabiwala Bank is suspected by us to be dictated by the Law of Entropy: “The entropy of an isolated system always increases with time. Entropy is the measure of the disorder or randomness of energy and matter in a system.” According to Professor Eddington, 'The law that entropy always increases—the second law of thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature'. We hold that Chabiwala Bank was quite organised once and that what is happening, was inevitable.
The votaries of large banks are powerful, and one strongly suspect, they represent interests of Merchant Bankers and the Bull lobbies, whose business it is to raise capital and render greedy retail investors bankrupt time to time. One longs for the day when greed is replaced by sense and Merchant Bankers and investors shift their preference to small and savvy banks, and not go after size.
Tailpiece:
Residents of a village are confronted by a strange problem that concerns a calf. Its head is stuck in the neck of a small earthen-ware pot. No amount of soaping and oiling helps, ears behaving like two valves, blocking the outward movement of the head.
Along comes Unttawarcha Shahana, who as we mentioned above, is assumed to be blessed with altitudinal wisdom. The villagers approach him in supplication, as Chabiwala Bank approaches (or usstuapproach) its great consultant.
“Hmmm…” he thinks hard and says, “well.., you have already worked on it, my men, and the only solution now is to chop off the head of the calf.” Having trusted the Consultant, villagers feel bounden to accept the recommendation, and comply.
Phase II: villagers murmur that the pot is now useless with the head inside.
“Well…, in that the case really, you have to break the pot and take the head out.” sez he, and exits.
JOHN BURDON SANDERSON HALDANE FRS (5 NOVEMBER 1892 – 1 DECEMBER 1964)
“No doubt I am in some sense a citizen of the world. But I believe with Thomas Jefferson that one of the chief duties of a citizen is to be a nuisance to the government of his state. As there is no world state, I cannot do this. On the other hand, I can be, and am, a nuisance to the Government of India, which has the merit of permitting a good deal of criticism, though it reacts to it rather slowly. I also happen to be proud of being a citizen of India, which is a lot more diverse than Europe, let alone the U.S.A, U.S.S.R or China, and thus a better model for a possible world organisation. It may of course break up, but it is a wonderful experiment. So, I want to be labeled as a citizen of India.”
Incidentally, a mythical entity ‘World Organisation’ in those post-War days, was supposed to be the ideal State set-up, one which would eliminate the phenomenon of Wars.
A visionary, in his fiction work Dᴂdalus ,Haldane anticipated the test-tube baby, a concept taken forward in fiction by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. One would also do well to remember that during the China war of 1962, he wrote to Pt. Nehru, offering to fight on the front, advanced age notwithstanding. Another interesting side-light, he would drive at break-neck speed on the busy Calcutta streets, and never hit even a fly, leave alone a tram!
Stephen Jay Gould, Evolutionary Biologist at Harvard writes this about Haldane:
Haldane was one of the great rascals of science—independent, nasty, brilliant, funny and totally one of a kind. Son of an Oxford professor of physiology, he began in science as his father's assistant. Eventually he taught genetics and biometry at University College, London, where he helped create the modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution.
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