“At turns humble and brilliant, practical and inspirational, Weology is the guidebook for the modern CEO. I’m going to send one to each of my CEO clients—and urge them to buy copies for the entire staff!” (Ted Coiné, co-author of A World Gone Social and CMO of Meddle.it)
“Peter Aceto is an unusual CEO. Employees don’t work for him, they work with him. He’s also an unusual leader. His team members don’t follow him, they join him. . . . We need more like him.” (David Chilton, author of The Wealthy Barber and former Dragon on CBC’s Dragons’ Den)
I very much enjoyed the book. However, I am still puzzled by the difference between practice and theory.
Employees
Employees are an important part of any company (more important than its' customers some say) and as expected this subject is treated at length in the book. Based on what I’d read I would have thought Tangerine is among the best places to work in Canada. But it isn’t .
'Canada’s Top 100 Employers' doesn’t list Tangerine. However, the other banks like RBC, TD, CIBC are in the list!
Also Glasdoor ratings show:
RBC - 3.7
TD - 3.7
Tangerine - 3.5
BMO - 3.5.
IT
I’d have expected for a bank that “lives” online not to have so many bugs (mortgage and my main banking accounts are with Tangerine). I kept pointing them out to the Customer Service - I have been doing software QA most of my professional life so I keep seeing bugs everywhere :) - but I’d lost my interest after my inquiry a few months later after my “reporting”, whether they’d be be fixed and I was told something along the lines that there are other priorities and this makes sense, I mean the bugs I’ve noticed weren’t so important. After all I still managed to open a business account with Tangerine despite some issues I'd encountered, many people would have given up, but these kind of people wouldn’t have tried to open a business account in the first place, they’d have chosen a traditional bank.
So how come what Peter Aceto preaches, and not only, but practices also (i.e. he writes about real things, what’s been doing and implementing as CEO at ING Direct/Tangerine) doesn’t seem to yield different results to the competition? I don’t know, otherwise I’d be a management consultant and write at least one best seller.
And an interesting fact I'd learned from the book; Peter Aceto’s father needed to take his BMW series 7 to the garage so he went with him. While waiting they struck up a conversation with a man who talked about his vision of a new, different kind of bank, a bank that would change banking forever. This man was Arkadi Kuhlmann, the founder of ING Direct (currently Tangerine). Peter Aceto later contacted him, and offered his services as he wanted to part of the vision. He got hired, and as they say the rest is history.
This made me think; I should have bought a Tesla instead of a Honda Fit. With a Honda I’ll never find myself in a similar situation.
