How did a stodgy state-owned institution become a dynamic bank?
“I am not a management guru and this is something that even I don’t fully understand. But what I do understand is that something good has happened,” said Bhatt, during a presentation on the transformation of SBI, at the first international conference on ‘Igniting the Genius Within’ at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, on Saturday. It wasn’t easy. “When I became the chairman, there were half a dozen or dozen others who could have become the chairman. As luck would have it, I became the chairman, though some of them may have been more competent than I . And this is the team I had to lead.” “But I could see the need for transformation. I took 25 of the top people into an offsite at Aamby Valley, near Pune. This had never happened in the history of SBI. I first made a presentation for two hours on the state of the bank in the context of the country and the economy. I told them that we all sitting in the room were responsible for what has gone wrong. And we alone could bring the ban
