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Wells Fargo's biggest mistake

Buffett & Munger2017-05-06video2:21Open original ↗

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SpeakersWarren1
[0:00]
WarrenAt Wells Fargo, you know, there were three very significant mistakes, but there was one that dwarfs all of the others. You're going to have incentive systems at any business, almost any business. There's nothing wrong with incentive systems, but you've got to be very careful what you incentivize, and you can't incentivize bad behavior, and if so, you better have a system for recognizing it. Clearly, at Wells Fargo, there was an incentive system built around the idea of cross-selling and number of services per customer and the company in every quarterly investor presentation highlighted how many services per customer. So it was the focus of the organization, a major focus, and undoubtedly people got paid and graded and promoted based on on that number, at least partly based on that number. Well, it turned out that that was incentivizing the wrong kind of behavior. we've made similar mistakes. I mean, any company is going to make some mistakes in designing a system, but it's a mistake. and you're going to find out about it at some point. The biggest mistake was that, and I don't know, obviously I don't know the facts, is how the information got passed up the line at Wells Fargo, But at some point, if there's a major problem, the CEO will get wind of it. And that is, at that moment, that's the key to everything, because the CEO has to act. I don't know what, I'm sure they've got an internal audit at Wells Fargo, and I'm sure they've got a hotline. And I don't know the facts, but I would just have to bet that a lot of communications came in on that, and I don't know what their system was for getting them to the right person. And I don't know who did what at any given time. But that was, it was a huge, huge, huge error if they were getting, uh, and I'm sure they were, getting some communications and they ignored them or they just sent them back down to somebody down below.