Citigroup (C); Pandit’s Pipe Dream

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Citigroup’s (C) CEO, Vikram Pandit, wasted the time of three dozen or so of his top executives. He took them on a retreat and laid out what he called “Rules of the Road." a seven-part guide to managing Citi in the future.

According to The New York Times,Those rules include items like “client connectivity,” “transparency” and “product excellence.” The program is simply a stack of cow pies and cliches. It is another indication of Pandit’s lack of skill to run the big financial services company.

What Pandit has not done is go to his management and the market with an overall plan for what assets Citi wants to keep and how it will put its still-considerable muscle behind them. He has not made it clear which assets are "non-core" and should be auctioned off to the highest bidders. Without the road map available for all to see, Pandit’s approach will be perceived as unfocused and unproductive.

The white board is empty. Pandit needs to get himself a black marker.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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