Matt Barrett: Barclay’s CEO Position

Barclays: Matt Barrett’s Journey- Winning Hearts and Minds Barclays was founded in 1690 in London. After 30 years later, Barclays started to expansion its area to the world, and became the first foreign bank to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington D.C. in 1981. Barclays’s global market capitalization rank was fourth in 1980. However, it fallen to 22 in 2000. In October 1999, Matt Barrett accepted the invitation of Barclays’s CEO position, and started to work on his challenge.
At that time, the situation of the Barclays is that institutional investors were unhappy, employees were demoralized, and the front-line and senior executives had lost confidence. Barrett soon discovered an excessive cost problem of Barclays and realized that the bank needed a shift in culture and mind-set, a new strategic direction, a structural overhaul, and an improved communications policy. Barrett had worked on changing the mind-set and culture of Barclays, and he believed that a more fact-based, value- growth orientation to running Barclays was essential. At first six month, Barrett started to build the foundation.
Barrett met approximately 10,000 employees during the initial three month. At the same time, Barrett developed his own vision for the bank- earn, invest, and grow. He planned to reduce cost by £1 billion for saving money from cost. Six months after Barrett became CEO, Barrett committed the goals were to apply equally to him to management, and everyone in the organization. Barrett started to change the top management. For example, Barrett appointed people to take position, which was a significant change on the ExCo and using young talent to the ExCo.

Barrett started to think about group strategy. In addition, Barrett and the ExCo decided to work with Marakon to set about looking at all businesses and activities from a value perspective, identifying where value was being created and where it was being destroyed. Under Barnett’s leadership, and with the help of Marakon’s systematic, fact-based approach, the ExCo developed a long-term strategic.