High Expectations
When Yemi Adeola was appointed the Managing Director of Sterling Bank in 2007, to some analysts and observers in the financial industry, he was a round peg in a round hole , a fitting candidate to the throne. He had surely earned his stripe in the high intensity, high adrenalin-pumping banking business in Nigeria as he was regarded a master strategist. With operating skills and strong attention to minute details that would make all the difference on both the top line and the bottom line, Sterling Bank was believed to be in a right hand
Truly , Yemi Adeola has an intimidating Curriculum Vitae,CV, to be successful and to lift any bank from obscurity to a glorious height in the corporate world. Academically , he was superlatively loaded . Mr. Adeola holds a bachelor’s degree in Law from Obafemi Awolowo University, is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria, Member Chartered Institute of Arbitration (CIARB) and Member, Board of Trustees, Association of Banks’ Legal Advisers and Company Secretaries (ABLACS). He is an alumnus of Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, University of Oxford, and the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a John F. Kennedy Scholar.
His wealth of experience also confirmed the view of his admirers. He years of rich experience in banking, finance, law, and corporate consultancy. He worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers as a Consultant, Legal and Corporate Advisory Services at Citibank, Nigeria where he rose to the position of Executive Director, Public Sector, and Infrastructure Banking. He was the Deputy Managing Director in Trust Bank of Africa Ltd from 2003 – 2005.
With the above rich pedigree, Yemi Adeola was believed to be well-armed with analytical, experience, and idea lenses to gain deep insights into relevant and appropriate strategies that could deliver competitive advantages for Sterling Bank.
Disappointed The Optimists
But with the current ugly fate of this bank , the optimists have been proved wrong. This is going by what the leadership of Sterling Bank promised its stakeholders, particularly its shareholders as reflected y its mission and vision statements or its strategic purposes . Its mission is to consistently deliver the products and services which enhance their financial success ,to deliver solutions that enhance stakeholders’ value, to live up to the needs of each customer in the communities it supports ; its vision is to be the financial institution of choice, become the preferred destination for investment capital, promote sustainable investing ,advance an inclusive and resilient economy and shape Nigeria’s financial landscape for the better.
Its core values are customer focus, integrity, teamwork, and excellence ; it promised to enrich lives ,support and collaborate to improve the lives of the people in communities where it is doing business.
As opposed to its stated strategic purposes , its strategic position has been largely impaired to the point that it has remained a weakling , battling with size disadvantage, inefficient operations, and poor asset quality particularly during the tenure of Yemi Adeola ; though its asset quality has improved now at a price .The bank had to go work, sleeves rolled-up, digging a trench for bad and delinquent loans to gain this at expense of profitability.
Throughout the eleven financial years of Adeola’s tenure as the Chief Executive Officer of the bank, it was a hope gone sour. Despite his impressive CV, his vast experience and exposure, sadly, his performance was not only unimpressive but also at variance with his intimidating credentials going by the facts and figures available to this magazine.
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The Figures
Figures tell this unpleasant story better. With facts and figures under Yemi Adeola, the bank’s performance very uninspiring between 2007 and 2018 .; this scenario queried his professional pedigree Though he started well with a supersonic growth of the.bank’s profit from N621m at the end 2007 financial year to N6.5b in the same period in 2008 . But the bank could not sustain this momentum till he left the bank as its CEO in 2018 .
Its profitability was stunted in the first five years under him with a loss N6b in 2009 ; it backtracked in 2010 to N4b compared to 2008 before it achieved N6.6b in 2011, perhaps with the acquisition and integration of Equatorial Trust Bank.Between 2012 and 2016 , the pace followed the same trend , growing at a snail speed from approximately N7b to N8.3b,N9b and N10.3 before it backtracked steeply N5.2b. The bank under Adeola sustained its roller coaster ride between 2017 with N13.5b profit in 2017 and N9b in 2018 before he exited the bank. Its total assets ,deposit and shareholder funds followed the same diminutive trend .
Analysts are not surprised about the fate of Sterling Bank. Its miserable profitability scenario above could be linked to its less share of influence over the trajectory of the industry development. A good leader maximizes the share of influence of his or her company, knowing fully well this is part of the broader competitive battle to maximize a share of future profits. Such a leader knows, a company’s share of influence and share of future profits is determined by the capability for accessing and harmonizing complementary resources, success in building core competencies central to the provision of customer value in the new opportunity arena, ability to accumulate market learning and its global share of influence to preempt competitors..Unfortunately, Sterling Bank’s leadership was not that ambitious under Adeola.
Some implications of the above scenario are ,indeed ,very scary. At the receiving end are the shareholders who have continued to gnash their teeth in agony as their hard earned investments have turned a burden, an albatross of sort under her tenure without any dividend. . A dividend is a reward paid to the shareholders for an investment in a company, and it usually is paid out of the company’s net profits ; a steady track record of paying dividends makes stocks more attractive to investors. But the uninspiring dividend and capital gain available to the Sterling Bank stock investors is the most oblivious stigma that could put off serious investors.
Dividend history at Glance :
2023 15k ;2022, 10k ; 2021 ,05k ;2020, 03; 2019 ,06k , 2016 ,09 k 2015 ,0 .2k; 2014, 25k; 2013 ,20k ; 2012, 20k.The pain of its shareholders could have been mitigated and they would have forgiven the bank for its miserable dividend if the company’s stock price is growing rapidly . But this is not case, it ontinues to oscillate front and back without enough to deliver any impressive capital gain.
EPS
Its poor dividend, market value and capital gain is confirmed by some critical performance indices . The first is its Earnings Per Share,EPS .A good way to determine earnings to the investor is the Earning Per Share (EPS), which is the monetary share value, i.e., what every share issued by the bank will receive from declared earnings. The higher the EPS, the more profitable the bank is. Full Year EPS for Sterling Bank in the last five years from 2019 to 2023 comes to about 75k in 2023 from 67k in 2022 to 52k in 2021 ,39k in 2020 from 37k in 2019 . When the prevailing high of inflation is factored into the values given to its investors as mirrored by its EPS, this is nothing but miserable return to investors.
ROA
From the perspective of its assets contribution to its profitability or how efficiently it uses the assets its owns to generate profits , the same message of lethargic value is communicated by the bottom line . For every N1.00 naira in assets owned by Sterling Bank , they earn 0.82k ,0.86k ,0.89k ,0.86k and 0.83k between 2017 and 2021 .In 2022 , it stood at N1 and went down to 0.85 in 2023 financial year.This poor scenario could be linked to the impressive rise in its assets without a simultaneous impressive rise in its top line .These ratios indicate less impressive asset turnover as the bank generated less than one naira for every one naira asset employed and thereby depicting an inefficient optimization of its available assets .
ROE
.Its ratio of return on Equity which suggests a company’s ability to return profits to its shareholders didn’t depart from the above trend ranging between 8.9 % ,9.0%,,9.4% ,8.9 %,8.3% and 9.6 % from 2017 to 2021 .The indication of the above trend is that for every naira invested in Sterling Bank, its investors would earn less than 10 percent as their return per share . In 2022 it rose to 12.5% but came down to 11.8 in 2023 . RoE,a ratio that holds the highest importance for any shareholder , is an indication of how well a company uses its shareholder’s funds. Analysts believe the above returns may not serve a goos signal for investors eyeing hidden-value opportunities for its investments .
What excuse did Adeola have to have left this bank staunted with miserable returns for the investors? The only excuse was the relative smaller size of its financial asset to his bank’s rivals as at the time of the consolidation exercise that brought the bank into the system ;the only defence opened to him was that if Sterling Bank had had more resources it could have performed better .
But that excuse is not enough . What could not be disputed is that a corporate entity could only suffer this fate where the dominant strategy frame pays much attention to the task of resource allocation . Though it is right to say since resources are scarce that strategy could be adopted ,but isn’t it equally top management’s job to effectively multiply a company’s resource base through creative approaches to resource leverage? Is leverage any less than allocation? If not , why the almost exclusive preoccupation with the allocational task under his leadership?
The argument against such a strategy is that where a leader views strategy as stretch and leverage, the size of resources at the disposal of a leader might not have wrecked any significant havoc on the fortune of a corporate entity. Analysts believed the problem with most leaders in the shoes of Adeola is not lack of resources but to many priorities, too little stretch and too little creative thinking about how to leverage resources. They believed showering them with more resources, in the absence of a fundamental improvement in their capacity to leverage resources would provide no more than temporary relief of the frustrations.
Beyond that , some analysts in a reaction to the issue of the bank’s resources size asked what stopped Adeola from growing the bank resources competitively ? After all, Zenith Bank,Access Bank and Guaranty Trust grew to industry leaders from the scratch by their founders to become industry leaders. .A corporate leader is expected to be a manager and an entrepreneur.
Though after the exit of Adeola with the baton given to Suleiman Abubakar , the bank experienced an unusual profitability growth from N15b in 2021 to N19.3b in 2022 , even with that, Sterling Bank has remained a laggard it was from the beginning .
The fate of Sterling Bank under Adeola may not be farfetched. Good companies are not difficult to know; by their fruits you shall know them. When you look into their recent high profile initiatives launched ,issues preoccupying senior management ,criteria and benchmarks by which progress is being measured ,the track record of new business creation
,dreams and fears on the faces of employees and the companies ’ ability to shape the future and regenerate success again and again in the years and decades to come, their leadership devote too much energy to a create the future and less to preserve the past with a broadly shared understanding of how the industry may be different in ten years in the future , headlights shining farther out than those of its competitors , a point of view about the future clearly reflected in the company’s short term priorities ,point of view of the future competitively unique
They are influential in setting the new rules of competition in the industry ,regularly defining the new ways of doing business, building new capabilities and setting new standards for customers satisfaction ,more a rule maker than a rule taker within its industry. ,more intent on challenging the industry status quo than protecting it ; they are fully alert to the dangers posed by new ,unconventional rivals ,keen at reinventing the current business model ,regenerating core strategies as it is reengineering the core processes ,pursuing growth and new business development with the same passion as they are pursuing operational efficiency and downsizing , with ability to know whether next revenue is coming from and where to save cost , percentage of the company improvement efforts that is more focused on creating new advantages new to the industry compared to that focused on merely catching up with the competitors ,with their agenda mostly offensive than defensive , driven by the company own view of opportunities rather than the actions of the competitors, less of a maintenance engineer keeping today’s business humming along but more an architect imagining tomorrow businesses ,with the ability to lift up its gaze out of the rut and consider what is out of the horizon ; even the balance between the hope and anxiety in the company, between confidence in its ability to find and exploit opportunities for growth and new business development and concern about its ability to maintain competitiveness in the company’s traditional businesses; between sense of opportunity and a sense of vulnerability, both corporate and personal more tilted to the left than to the right.
But in the case of Sterling Bank it is the other way round, there is every indication that the bank is devoting too much energy to preserving the past and not enough to create g the future ; it remains on a treadmill, trying to keep one strong step ahead of the steadily declining margins and profit of yesterday’s businesses No Respite . Despite His Appointment As Chairman,Board of Directors.
The most embarrassing is that , despite the above unimpressive performance ,Adeola was brought back as the chairman of its board of directors. He was brought back to lead the body that is responsible for overseeing the strategy, direction, and performance of a company. His key responsibilities are setting strategic direction ,approving and monitoring the company’s strategic plan; reviewing business plans, evaluating and approving business plans, budgets, and forecasts ; monitoring performance, overseeing the company’s performance and making adjustments as needed; ensuring governance and compliance or ensuring regulatory compliance ,ensuring the company complies with relevant laws, regulations, and industry standard ;maintaining governance framework ,establishing and maintaining a robust governance framework, including policies, procedures, and control and overseeing risk management by identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks that could impact the company
Most importantly, this body is responsible for selecting, evaluating, and compensating the CEO and ensuring a robust succession planning process is in place for key positions.
Unfortunately, in this new capacity as the bank’s engine room , his return has not made any difference. The damage done to the financial health of Sterling Bank comes up vividly when its performances are compared over time. The most visible and miserable signal is its stauntednes ; when compared with sector indices , it became a miserable laggard and the worst is seen when it is featured relative to best in class indicators .
Sterling Bank: 2024 Full year results.
A detailed analysis of Sterling Bank performance in 2024 confirmed this as much from various perspectives. From the face value it is tempting to conclude that the fortunes of this bank have improved with return of Adeola as the Chairman,Board of Directors . Its Gross earnings hit N328.349 billion , a +54.21% YoY increase .Sterling Holdings pre-tax profit surges by 97% to N44.753 billion in 2024 while its Profit after tax grew by 73.4 % from N21,584b to N37,522b.
However, to think so is a big error ; the leopard has not changed its spot , particularly when Sterling Bank is subjected to certain critical performance measures.Though by using a historical yardstick, its performance shows some improvements over time and could help one to identify some significant changes, but this could be very deceptive too . For instance while the bank recorded an impressive jump in its revenue between2023 and 2024 financial years , its market share and profit remained insignificant in an absolute term relative to others ; the percentage jump or increase has not changed its strategic position or status as a glorified community bank even among the tier 2 banks it belongs.
One important observation is that there is no indication that the bank has gained any competitive advantage . Moreover, the danger in it is that relying on this yardstick to measure performance could lead to complacency by forgetting it is the rate of improvement compared with that of competitors that is important. Some banks or corporate entities prefer this yardstick to create an impressive performance to the gullible investors and other stakeholders.
Its insignificant market share or position in terms of the volume its revenue and profitability becomes clearer when juxtaposed with its peers among the tier 2 banks .As at December 31, 2024, FCMB Group’s gross earnings were N794.8 billion, while its Group’s profit after tax for the year ending December 31, 2024 was N107.9 billion. The gap between Sterling Bank and Fidelity Bank and Stanbic IBTC is more embarrassing in terms of revenue and profitability despite the fact that the two banks are equally classified as tier 2 banks , indicating Sterling Bank is just a dot on the industry map . It is not only in terms profitability and revenue, other indicators demonstrating its staunted fortune are its assets and deposit base relative to its peers .
Benchmarking Sterling Bank against best in class performance wherever it may be found is not even desirable with its poor trajectory relative to its peers among tier 2 banks .
In a nutshel , the signal from the management remain its inability to grow the bank both in terms profitability and revenue due not only to its limited resources but also to its poor resource leverage to generate better values for money.
The above ugly scenario may not be farfetched. Investors are not only interested in a company’s profitability, they are equally interested in its capability to generate better value for money, growth and service delivery as well .
Stock investors negative market response is a very visible measure of their annoyance towards the inepitude Sterling Bank leadership. STERLINGNG closed its last trading day (Friday, March 7, 2025) at 5.12 NGN per share on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NGX), recording a 1.5% drop from its previous closing price of 5.20 NGN. Sterling began the year with a share price of 5.60 NGN but has since lost 8.57% off that price valuation, ranking it 129th on the NGX in terms of year-to-date performance. Shareholders’ worries are compounded by the fact that STERLINGNG has lost 14% of the stock’s value from February 7th to date.
Measuring Sterling Bank in terms of its effectiveness relative to its peers shed a better light on why the investors are displeased with this bank as indicated above share price movements ; its internal operational efficiency remains its biggest headache .This is particularly so when its shareholder value and productivity gains, such as cost reduction and efficiency gains are considered.
One performance indicator that confirms its weakling position in terms of value creation is the profit margin , a financial ratio that measures the percentage of profit earned by a company in relation to its revenue. Expressed as a percentage, it indicates how much profit the company makes for every naira of revenue generated. Between 2023 and 2024 its pretax profit margin improved from N10.70% to N13.60% .The indication of this is that from every N100 made as its revenue only N13.60k is retained at its pretax level while post tax margin it made N11.43k compared N10 in the previous year ,indicating about N90 is spent to generate N100
Another indicator that displays its inefficiency is its Cost to income ratio, a financial metric that measures a company’s operational efficiency by comparing its operating costs to its operating income ; a performance yardstick essentially showing how much a company needs to spend to generate one naira of income; a lower ratio indicates greater efficiency, meaning the company is spending less to earn revenue, and is often used primarily in the banking sector to assess how well a bank manages its expenses relative to its income. This ratio which stood at 75 percent in 2023 compared to 72 percent in 2024 confirmed it as a highly inefficient and less resourceful bank .
The reason for this may not far to seek in a bank with an abnormal high Net impairment loss on financial assets: N9.929 billion and total expenses of N145.194 billion +38.05% relative to operating income of N199.876 billion, an increase of 42.56% YoY. Total expenses rose by 38% YoY to N145 billion, consuming 76% of net operating income after impairments.This indicates elevated cost pressures, which eroded its profitability despite revenue growth.
Moreover, while the bank’s customer Deposit grew at 39.37% to N2.568 trillion reflecting a good liquidity position ,its interest expenses on the same customer deposits increased by 74% YoY, indicating that the bank is paying more to attract and retain deposits.
Despite the sharp rise in interest expenses, its share of total interest expenses declined slightly by 2% YoY, suggesting that other funding sources (such as deposits from other banks, borrowings or debt securities) may be contributing more to overall costs.
Specifically, interest expenses paid on bank’s deposit surged by 403% YoY increasing their contribution to total interest expenses to 17%. The bank’s rising costs demonstrates lack of strategic cost control and operational efficiency improvements that are crucial to sustaining long-term profitability.
Implications of the Bank’s Failure on Stakeholders Trust and Confidence
The key culprit of the above ugly scenario remains the bank’s leadership less competitive capability to effectively manage and deploy resources to generate competencies that could outperform competition in the critical areas of the surplus , deficit, shareholder, regulatory authorities and community at large.
The negative outcomes of the failure of its leadership in those critical areas are no doubt far-reaching on the trust and confidence reposed on the capability its stakeholders. When a bank is unable to deliver up to the expectations of its stakeholders across five critical constituencies , the trust is shaken
Trust and confidence gained by a bank from its shareholders is a big asset to any bank .Banking is built on trust and confidence and a core source of trust and confidence is usually from the capability of a company to deliver impressive returns to shareholders. But Sterling Bank shareholders or its investors who expect returns on their capital have not been getting inspiring shareholder values in line with their request for maximum or adequate returns on their investments . For this purpose alone, it might be difficult for the leadership of Sterling Bank to convince and retain its existing shareholders or to bring more investors . This has remained a biggest challenge to this bank’s leadership’s aspiration to grow.
The direct negative impacts of the above managerial ineptitude are not insignificant. Its share price has remained at a miserable class as it has refused to cross to the medium stage .Rule 15.29 of the Rulebook of The Exchange, 2015 (Dealing Members’ Rules) notes that equities priced above N5 per share for at least four of the most recent six months of trading or new security listings priced above N5 per share at the time of listing on NGX are Classified as Medium price stock. Sterling Bank has not been able to satisfy this condition .
In the surplus units, individuals and institutions that deposit their funds in banks expect the bank to ensure the best possible term in rates of interest , maturity structures and the maximum liquidity to enable them to have the funds back when they want them , or as agreed.
In the period under review, though the customer deposits of Sterling Bank hit N2.568 trillion , a +39.37% increase indicating some elements of trust and confidence .However, this achievement came with a dangerous cost to the bank . Its interest expenses on customer deposits increased by 74% YoY, indicating that the bank is paying more to attract and retain deposits. This shows stakeholders confidence and trust was bought at a higher price to increase its deposits .
The same reecho in the deficit units from the borrowers who rely on banks for funding.They want to borrow when they need the funds and as cheaply as possible .Like the lenders ,the borrowers also impose the obligation of maximum liquidity on the banks to enable them to obtain funds when they need them.
Sterling Bank,indeed,lived up to this. Sterling Bank’s loans and advances to customers inched up to N1.104 trillion ,a+23.22% increase YoY, but a bank is good when it lends money safely and profitably. For years , particularly under Adeola , a big drawback on the fortune of this bank was its toxic loans that eroded its profitability. Though the bank’s non performing loan ratio is now within the minimum requirement of the regulatory authorities, a big threat from its non performing loans is the heavy provisions or impairment for the credit loss that clipped its profitability wings.
Moreover , one observation is that the bank risk aversion strategy is a double-edged weapon that helps it to maintain its going concern and satisfy the regulatory authorities but continues to limit its profitability .To stay safe , it has continued to balance its asset allocation , allocating its earnings assets with caution , with greater attention security portfolios as a source of its revenue.
Behind its Laggard Fate
Sterling Bank has not been faring better than a company that succeeds at restructuring and reengineering but fails to create the markets of the future or develop a prescient and distinctive view about the future., the objective of which is to build a deeply shared, well tested view of the future as opposed to personal and idiosyncratic view
But the inability of Sterling Bank’s leadership to change from the laggard’s leadership attitudes highlighted above may not raise any eyebrow considering the challenging nature of the tasks involved. It takes substantial and sustained intellectual energy to develop high-quality and robust competences, to pioneer new product or service concepts , to form new and relevant alliances, to know what nascent development programmes to protect and what long term regulatory initiatives to pursue before such laggard attitudes could be reversed .
This is not however, , to say its senior executives, were lazy . Analysts believed those initiatives were left undone or unpursued either because they were not in control of the bank’s future or what they knew -the knowledge and experience that justified their position in the corporate pecking order- might be irrelevant or wrongly-headed to the future; it could also be because those initiatives directly challenged that they were really in control, have better headlights than anyone else in the bank or have a clear and compelling view of the bank’s corporate direction .
But the leadership alternatives to creating the future were not enough either to deliver to the bank its strategic purposes. Though the leadership continues to sustain the bank’s going concern, but the problem is that in this situation ,the urgent usually drives out the important; the future goes largely unexplored and the capacity to act ,rather than the capacity to think and imagine ,become the sole measure of leadership ; in the absence of future, what occupies the senior managers attention are : restructuring or downsizing and reengineering or core process redesign
Although the two are legitimate and important tasks but they have more to do with shoring up today businesses than creating tomorrow industries , they are no substitute for imaging and creating the future , they don’t ensure continued success if the company fails to regenerate its strategies .
.A company that succeeds at restructuring and reengineering but fails to create the markets of the future will find itself on a treadmill, trying to keep one strong step ahead of the steadily declining margins and profit of yesterday’s businesses.
When a company is run by managers not leaders ,by maintenance engineer, not architect such a company is usually at the mercy of the accelerating pace of industry change. This has been the biggest challenge of Sterling Bank .
It is not the only bank confronted by this challenge .The painful upheavals in so many companies in the recent years reflect the failure of onetime leaders to keep up with the accelerating pace of industry change prompted by the tides of technological, demographic, and regulatory change and order of magnitude productivity and quality gains made by non-traditional competitors
For this lacuna, all too many cases , the foundation of the past are usually shaken and fractured when the industrial terrain changed shape faster than the top management could refashion its basic beliefs and assumptions which markets to serve ,which technologies to master ,which customers to serve and how to get the best out of employees
Buffeted by above forces only few are seem to be in control of their own destiny. Many others saw their success eroded or destroyed. This was the fate of Sterling Bank.
This may not be farfetched. Any company that is bystander and not a driver on the road to the future will find its structure, values and skills becoming progressively less attuned to an ever changing industry reality . Such a discrepancy between the change in the pace of industry environment and pace of change in the internal environment brings out or spawn the daunting task of organization transformation. The organization transformation agenda typically includes downsizing ,overhead reduction, employee empowerment, process redesign and portfolio rationalization
Despite this ugly scenario ,the leadership of this bank has to sustain its going concern albeit amidst stagnant growth, declining margins and falling market share
When the above become inescapable most executives pick up the knife and begin the brutal work of restructuring. And the goal is to carve away layers of corporate fat ,jettison underperforming businesses and raise the asset productivity..
For the management that goes for restructuring, return on capital employed, shareholders value and revenue per employee always become their primary arbiters of their performance to achieve efficiency and productivity
In order to save his job he makes use of corporate resources, launches a tough programme to improve the return on investment because if he doesn’t do that someone will be given a chance to do it ; the return on investment, ROI has two components, numerator or net income and denominator or investment, net assets or capital employed. In a service industry, headcount may be appropriate denominator.
One fact that cannot be disputed is that managers of the firms that go restructuring know that raising net income is likely to be a harder slog than cutting assets and headcount
To grow the numerator , top management must have a point of view about where the new opportunities lie ,must be able to anticipate changing customer needs ,must have invested in building new competencies and so on
Consequently , under intense pressure for quick ROI ,executives reach for the lever that will the quickest ,surest improvement in ROI, the denominator
To cut the denominator, top management doesn’t need more than the pencil . This is reason why managers are usually obsessed with the denominator. Denominator management is an accountant short cut to assess productivity. This is not to go against efficiency and productivity .A company must be able to get to the future first and get there for less . But this is to emphasize that there is more than one route to productivity improvement. Just as a firm cuts denominator and holds up the revenue will reap productivity gains , so too will any company that succeeds in growing its revenue stream atop slower growing or constant capital and employment base . But the second is believed to be more desirable by analysts
Hopeless Cloud Over Sterling Bank’s Turnaround
The fear around this bank is the probability of its leadership capability for reinventing it for better and competitive performance in the near future.
In a situation like this, a corporate leadership is expected to come up with some strategic choices in a bid to outperform competition and improve his or her company’s strategic position .
Corporate organizations comfronted by the challenges for reinventing a brand of this status for a better and competitive performance deploy some strategic weapons or choices to achieve good results. The first challenge is to gain some competitive advantages that could help it to outperform competition ; it strives to compete in a market either on the basis of cost , differentiation, by being more flexible and fleet-of-foot than competitors or adopt a more cooperative approach to competitors appropriately to achieve the above feat.
Also , to change its less impressive strategic position, it could reshape its current strategic direction in terms of which products, services and markets to pursue. While some choose to focus on just a few products ,services and markets, others could decide to be much broader in scope, perhaps become very diversified in terms of both prod- ucts (or services) and markets by creating new products or entering new territories by adopting international strategy or transform its operations through innovation and entrepreneurial strategy.
It could also make a choice as regards methods by which to pursue strategies, either to pursue growth independently by organic development or inorganically by acquisitions or strategic alliances with other organizations
No doubt , the leadership of Sterling Bank is neither oblivious nor ignorant of the about the availability of the above weapons at its disposal to gain advantage and outperform competition .But none of the above initiatives appears to be delivering to it any competitive advantage to outperform its rivals . The question now is why ?
Anyway , there are several factors that could hinder the success of those options or strategic choices . Failure of forces in the operating environment to respond to strategic choices or leadership initiatives could be traced to inadequate resources and incompetent leadership.
Due to a leadership ineptitude, the expected performance outcomes of certain strategies may not live up to the stakeholders expectations, particularly when a strategy doesn’t address the circumstances in which an organization is operating or its current strategic position ; it may not also be feasible if the doesn’t have the resources and competences to deliver a strategy. To avert this failure , knowledgeable strategic leaders ensure their strategic choices, or options, potentially available to their organizations for responding to the positioning issues are made in the context of an organization’s strategic position.
More importantly, even when a strategy is appropriate and resources are adequate , there is a question of its implementation . In other words ,the most critical factors are what happen at the implementation level of strategy not merely the strategic choices or purposes intended ,a corporate leadership is a decisive factor .
No doubt , the less inspiring position of Sterling Bank in the industry could be pinned down to the qualities of its resources and leadership competencies. A terrible source of concern,however, is that Sterling Bank may remain on the treadmill endlessly without resolving those two critical issues .
This view may not be misplaced. While strategy concerns an organisation’s long-term direction ,one important dimension of which is to create new value and competitive advantages for an organization ,however, people are at the heart of strategy. The knowledge and experience of people can be the key factors enabling the success of strategies .But they can also hinder the adoption of new strategies too as human resources may hinder strategy if they are not tailored to the types of strategies being pursued .
Even the influence of resources in a strategic success is conditional. While possession of resources is also critical to the success of strategies, this doesn’t merely always guarantee the success of strategies because strategic capability is concerned with how the resources are deployed,managed,controlled and, in the case of people motivated to create competencies in those activities and business processes needed to run the business.
Consequently , at the implementation level of the above strategic choices, the roles of a corporate leadership in strategic processes, organization configuration, management of strategic changes and how key strategic areas are resourced are definitely imperative.
For the above reason, because of the overwhelming role of people in the success of a strategy ,analysts believed it could be absolutely difficult, if not impossible, for Sterling Bank to gain competitive advantages against its competitors with bigger assets and better leadership that deliver scale advantages on cost with the current qualities of its leadership.
The only escape route for Sterling Bank is to be a niche player or to rewrite the rules of the game. Even with these options, only a leadership with necessary skills could take that advantage. Moreover, the dilemma confronting Sterling Bank is that the bigger banks are equally operating in those niche areas with bigger resources and better competences.
Sterling Holdings Escape Route
The only option for Sterling Bank is to grow its resources competitively and manage them competently too . This view may not be farfetched. Organisations need not only to build competitive advantages in relation to current domestic and international competitors, but to identify growth opportunities for the future and create new products and services, technologies, resources and capabilities. This is significant both for start-ups in new industries and for established organisations in mature ones.
Sterling Bank is neither achieving any competitive advantage nor growing its resources competitively , all because of the quality of its leadership. For this reason ,Sterling Bank is dire need of a leadership with well versed in strategic entrepreneurship , the one that combines strategy and entrepreneurship, both advantage-seeking strategy activities and opportunity-seeking entrepreneurial activities to create competitive value . While its strategy is expected to support the leadership efforts forming competitive advantages, its leader’s entrepreneurship skill is expected to contribute to the identification of new opportunities in the market or environment ; entrepreneurs innovate by identifying and exploiting new ideas and inventions .The entrepreneurship and one of its most central ingredients and outcomes, innovation, are fundamental for creating value for customers, organisational growth and prosperity ; innovation is also a key aspect of business-level strategy and models with implications for cost, price, differentiation and sustained competitive advantage.
But only a leader that has what it takes to build a company competing for the future could achieve above feat and change a badly impaired strategic position of Sterling Bank, not dilettantes . In other words, reinvigorating and reinvention of Sterling Bank is not for a merely intellectually curious but for those not content to follow, who desire to rewrite the rules of the game ,unafraid of orthodoxy, more inclined to build than to cut , those concerned to make the difference than making career and those who absolutely committed to staking out the future first .
The race to the future occurs in three distinct, overlapping stages .Competition to foresight and intellectual leadership, to foreshorten migration path and FOR for market position and market share.This is where the fate of Sterling Bank was determined and it was bypassed by its rivals with better leadership. At the first stage, the leadership must conceive of an alternate industry structure or a new opportunity arena with a goal to out-think and out-imagine competitors.
The race for foresight and intellectual leadership is to gain deeper understanding than competitors of the trends and discontinuities — technological, demographic, regulatory, or lifestyle—that could be used to transform industry boundaries and create new competitive space . The motive is to be prescient about the size and shape of tomorrow opportunities and to conceive fundamentally new type of customer benefits, or to conceive radically new ways of delivering existing customers benefits .it is a competition to imagine the future.
In between the battle for intellectual leadership and the battle for market share is typically a battle to influence the direction of industry development; it is a race to accumulate necessary competencies (and overcome technical hurdle) ,to test and prove out alternate product and service concepts (by progressively discovering what customers really want),to attract coalition partners who have critical complementary resources, to construct whatever product or service delivery infrastructure may be required , and get agreement around standards ,if necessary.Competition to shape migration paths is, like competition for intellectual leadership, premarket or extramarket competition in that there is little or no direct, product-to-product rivalry between firms.
If the competition in the first stage is competition to imagine a new opportunity arena, the second stage is competition to actively shape the emergence of that future industry structure to one’s own advantage, at the third stage is a battle for market share and market position with fairly well defined parameters of value ,price, cost and service ; at the third stage , the competition is for the market power and position once the new opportunities “take off” and the new industry structure begins to form. Here , much of the technical uncertainty has been resolved, there is a tangible product or service to offer, the value chain has taken a definite form, and the complementary roles of buyers and suppliers are more or less clear. This is where Sterling Bank is actively doing the battle for the industry leadership. Unfortunately, it is the first two stages of the battle for the industry leadership that determine the ultimate industry leadership though the third stage is equally important. Because Sterling failed to do either of the above it has been difficult for the bank to gather competitive power to capture the market power and position ,the third stage in a battle to an industry leadership, relative to its peers .
Typically, the existing industry structure works to the disadvantage of everyone save the industry leader. A firm like Sterling Bank is believed to have taken the industry structure more or less as a given as opposed the market leaders which are able to harness the forces of globalization, deregulation, technology, or demographics to transform industry structure to their own advantage.
What is needed by Sterling Bank is a capacity to transform the structure of an industry ;it does not need the what of industry structure but the why of industry restructuring. Instead, firms eager to overturn the present industry order challenge “accepted practice,” redraw segment boundaries, set new price-performance expectations, and reinvent the product or service concept. Foresight, stretch, and leverage provide the energy and rationale for proactive advantage building and industry re-engineering.
Specifically, at those three stages of the competition for the future, a leader that expected to transform and outperform competition must be well armed with the powers of strategic foresight, architecture, intent and leverage. These are missing links in the Sterling Bank battle for the delivery of its strategic purposes . .
Without a strategic leader with foresight and wherewithal to build a new industry strategic architecture, it will be difficult if not impossible, for Sterling Bank to change from its current uninspiring strategic position. Just as an architect must be capable of dreaming of things not yet created and also be capable of producing a blueprint for how to turn the dream to reality, Sterling Bank leadership must do the same .
But getting to the future first takes more than thoughtfully conceived strategic architecture; strategic architecture is the map , but what about the fuel? The fuel for the journey is not the money alone, after all ,many resource rich firms have surrendered the future to poorer rivals. To avert this consequence , the leadership of this bank greatly needs to co-opt the emotional and intellectual energy of the employees that provides the fuel for the journey
In other words , its CEO’s ability to mobilize every ounce of emotional and creative energy in the bank is essential. Strategic architecture is the brain; strategic intent which is the heart and implies a significant stretch for the organization is,indeed, very imperative.
Finally , the current leadership of Sterling Bank must be able to demonstrate that it is possible to do more with less with core competences in critical areas. Core competences, the capabilities that underlie leadership in a range of products or services are what are imperative for the leadership of Sterling . This is because a key challenge in competing for the future is to preemptively build the competencies that provide gateways to tomorrow’s opportunities as well as to find novel applications of current core competencies. Any company that wants to capture a disproportionate share of profits from tomorrow’s markets must build the competencies that will make a disproportionate contribution to future customer value.
With the above explanations, what is obvious or not disputable is that Sterling Bank must fight and win three -stage related and interdependent battle for the future to be competitive .
Although Sterling Bank has been engaging itself in re engineering its processes to some extent to create the future, it has not demonstrated the capability of “re engineer ” its industry. The logic is simple: to extend leadership a company must eventually reinvent leadership, to reinvent leadership it must ultimately reinvent its industry, and to reinvent its industry it must ultimately regenerate its strategy ; surely , the top management’s primary task is reinventing the industry and regenerating strategy, not re engineering processes.
To achieve this , Sterling must change in some fundamental ways the rules of engagement in this long-standing industry, redraw the boundaries between its industry and others ; and/or create entirely a new industry to its advantages. This is more so as the capacity to invent a new industry and reinvent old ones is a prerequisite for getting to the future first and a precondition for staying out in front.
Consequently, Sterling is in a dire need of a leadership that could think differently competitively, organizationally and strategically to regain its industry leadership .The message from the above analysis is simple: to become an industry leader or sustain leadership is not for the dilettantes
