Morning Coffee: Citi exec who fired 5,000 bankers is gone herself. JPMorgan's new approach to graduate recruitment

efinancialcareers.com:

It’s always a question worth asking yourself when you take on a project with a defined end date or completion condition – what’s my endgame here?  When I finish the project, what will happen to me? There are all too many sad stories of bankers who worked allhours to achieve a goal, then found out that once the thing was done, they weren’t needed any more.  Conversely, there are plenty of cases where getting a deal across the line created so much tension and bad blood that it was impossible for the executives involved to go on working together.

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Titi Cole, who has just left Citigroup, seems to have planned ahead in exactly this way.  She was in charge of Project Bora Bora, and previously headed the “Legacy Franchises” division, both jobs in which she was responsible for getting rid of a lot of Citi bankers.  Although the job cuts aren’t finished yet, the first round came to a conclusion earlier in the year, and Cole has now resigned to go to an unnamed non-profit job. 

This was apparently always her plan – according to an insider, Cole had been ready to leave before Bora Bora had even been announced.  She also has experience in this area, having come to Citi shortly after completing a big restructuring (with many redundancies) at Wells Fargo.

It’s often the rational thing for executives to do.  However necessary you believe it to be, a large redundancy program leaves a lot of negative emotion hanging around.  People have friends, who bear grudges.  The senior managers who do the most work on cost-cutting tend to be treated like the veterans of an unpopular war; in principle, their service is honoured, but nobody wants to hear their stories and many would rather not be