Managing for
THE FUTURE
MlLAN - LICENCED TO BANK
I
Every September, a group of new management trainees begins an
intensive two-year course covering every conceivable area of
banking. Practical work periods are built into the course and each 4
trainee spends time in each of CBS's divisions and at a member J
O
bank. But the emphasis tends to be on theory and the closest they 4
What's NewS Issue 3 June/July 1995
come to large corporate clients is case studies.The marketing day
changed all that. What's NewS sat in with the current erop of
graduates as they came into first-time contact with real live clients.
The Graduates - f.l.t.r. standing: Marjan van de Weijden, Jeroen
Wakkerman, Tanja Cuppen, Rachel Bosman, Barbara de Kanter;
seated: Gerrit Willem Gramser, Erik van de Brake, Mijntje Rovers,
Karina Joosten, Ferry de Vries, Tred Griffejoen.
'Imparting the theory hehind marketing
^nd telling the trainees all kinds of anec-
dotal stories is all very well,' says Kim
Egger of marketing services, 'but if you
really want to know what clients want,
then you have to ask the clients.' And that
is precisely what the marketing services
department did when they were invited to
provide a day-long program for the man
agement trainees. Two major corporate
clients were willing to participate in the
program - Sjoerd Zittema of the Hero
concern and J. de Lange of the Dutch
operation of Recticel, an international
foam rubber company.
'Our main concern was to combine theory
and practice,' says Egger, 'and to prove
that the theory is truly relevant to the
practice. In fact, it looked as though we
had set everything up with the clients in
advance and agreed on what they would
^ay, because they confirmed all we'd told
the participants. But we hadn't.'
CLIENT CONTACT
Says one of the trainees: 'I think the most
useful part was when Zittema of Hero
told us what we should and shouldn't do
when approaching a cliënt. The one that
really stuck in my mind was: never use the
word problem, a cliënt doesn't have "pro-
blems", always talk in terms of opportun-
ities. He also said you shouldn't come in
and start talking about the bank, or the
products. You should come in and let
them talk. But the bottom line was that
we also had to listen.'
In preparation, the trainees had been given
Hero's annual report. 'What we asked
them to do,' says Egger, 'was to approach
Hero as if the company was a prospect.
They had to put together a presentation
based on what they had discovered about
the cliënt from this data - the company's
goals, needs, etc. And to work out how
the bank could be of assistance. In other
words, not to go in with a lot of products,
but to try and look at what was relevant
from the client's point of view. Both Zit
tema and De Lange feit it had been a pos-
itive experience.'
RECRUITMENT CRITERIA
This particular group of graduates are
now in their ninth month of training and
are already at home in the organization.
The next group will begin its two-year
course in September, thus ensuring the
bank has a continual inflow of manage
ment trainees for CBS placement in the
future. Graduates are recruited from all
universities in the Netherlands. And in
addition to academie excellence, the bank
also looks very closely at attitude and
social skills. 'We're actually a pretty eclec-
tic group,' says one of the trainees.
'Many of us are basically economics
graduates, but our majors can be very
different - anything from international to
business administration. And some of us
are lawyers. So we come from a variety
of academie backgrounds and insti-
tutions.'
While all will stream into CBS at the end
of their training period, they are not oblig-
ed to choose a specific discipline until
that time. 'Some of us already know what
we'd like to do because we do practical
work periods in all the divisions,' says a
trainee. 'But the divisions themselves are
looking at us just as closely as we're
looking at them. Hopefully, you're able to
make a real impression and find a place in
the particular area you want.'
mixed feelings and a lot of
happy faces when Ajax
won.' CBS Utrecht was
well represented at the of
ficial opening, not least be
cause an Investor Relations
roadshow was held to
mark the upgrading of the
Milan office into a fully-
fledged branch operation.
As the picture shows,
Rabobank Italia welcomed
both the Utrecht contingent
and institutional investors
in true Italian style.
KEN UW KLANT
Het zijn de bankiers en/of managers van de
toekomst: het selecte gezelschap van jonge,
veelbelovende academici, dat dit jaar de
intensieve management-training van het
Centrale Bankbedrijf volgt. De opleiding
duurt twee jaar. Ondanks een aantal stages
bij de verschillende directoraten en bij een
lokale bank, is het theoretische gehalte hoog.
De trainees kregen de kans hun theoretische
kennis aan de praktijk te toetsen tijdens een
marketingdag, waaraan twee belangrijke
klanten; Hero en Recticel deelnamen.
Milan branch didn't
choose the date of its offi
cial opening - May 24 - to
coincide with the Ajax-AC
Milan European charn-
pionship game, but it cer-
tainly proved a hit with all
of the 200 guests who at-
tended the party that even-
ing. 'Philips, a prospective
cliënt in Italy,
offered to lend
us a giant screen
for the game,'
says general man
ager Roberto
de Cardona,
'and as you can
imagine, there
were some