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“And Enterprises of Great Pith and Moment…”: Organizational Values and What Went Wrong at HSBC
Mohan Gopinath, Diganta Saikia, and Dolphy M. Abraham
Alliance University, Bangalore, India
Volume 8: 2015, pp. 57-72; ABSTRACT
The first part of the title of this paper is from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, with the next line “With this regard their currents turn awry”. For HSBC, the currents did recently turn most glaringly awry and we have in this paper analyzed the possible reasons for this from the points of view of what went wrong, why this happened, and if the bank’s reactions to them were appropriate or not. This paper takes the perspective of real life issues as repored in the press. It uses a Leadership Development Model and draws some conclusions on why the failures occurred. These failures were compounded by the fact that the bank had been viewed as the epitome of systemic perfection in banking circles. The paper will be of interest to instructors and students of organizational behavior and to bankers (past, present and future). The UK based newspaper The Guardian covered the problems of HSBC in depth. We have drawn on some of their comments in this current paper and acknowledge the fact that they have greatly added value to our discussions and conclusions.
