A dusty closet of long-forgotten oil portraits is not where you would expect to find lessons in stewardship and leadership. But that is where mine began.
In 1998, more than 110 years after its founding and through the tenures of six leaders before me, I was handed the unenviable task of selling a bank that had survived financial panics, the Great Depression, a record flood, two world wars, and wave after wave of technological change. Of those six predecessors I had known only one: Pat Cvengros, who brought me in as his CFO in the 1980s to help modernize the bank further. We worked together and knew each other’s families, yet I knew little about how he had come to lead Citizens Bank, and even less about the five presidents before him who built the institution that its board, with a generation of aging shareholders ready to cash out, ultimately directed me to sell.
When I learned the old building was being emptied and its contents discarded, nostalgia sent me back for one last look. In a closet I found six long-forgotten portraits of those presidents, stacked and headed for a dumpster. With permission, I took them home and set out on what I expected would be a simple errand: find a living descendant of each man and return his ancestor’s portrait in person. The errand became an obsession to understand who these men were, and that became a book, Seven Visions, One Legacy.
Not until I studied the individuals who turned a single idea and $50,000 in capital in 1888 into the bank I sold for $285 million in 1998 did I understand the difference between stewardship and ownership, or why some leaders build institutions that last a century while others never reach critical mass.
Through the upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many banks opened in Paducah, Kentucky, and most of them failed. Citizens probably knew the least about marketing and was certainly the least flashy of the bunch. So why did it endure when its competitors did not? What did my predecessors do differently? Was it discipline, or simply luck? From the research and interviews behind the book, three lessons stand out.
Lesson 1: Manage for the generation after the next one
Shareholders and markets can be unrelenting in their demand for an immediate payoff, and many leaders are chosen precisely because they are built to deliver now, but the presidents of Citizens were not. I could not locate the old board minutes, but I doubt any director ever urged a president to take more risk, press customers for more business, or chase a new revenue stream. From the records I found and the descendants I interviewed, none of them took a short-term view, and none seemed troubled by what the bank down the street was doing. If a competitor wanted to make a loan to a marginal business, so be it.
The presidents shared attributes and attitudes that ran much deeper than lending standards. They were rooted in the community, they knew their customers, they were invested in the long-term prosperity of Paducah, and they refused to change their approach to hit an arbitrary target. Crises came and went; their posture stayed constant, steadily leaning into their customers rather than away from them. The lesson for any leader, and any advisor counseling one, is that the truest test of a decision is not what it does this quarter, but whether it leaves the enterprise stronger for the people who will inherit it.
Lesson 2: Stewardship and long-term value are the same work
We tend to assume that a company which has lasted a very long time must be run by people who stopped adapting somewhere along the way, who long ago settled into a comfortable rut. My deep dive into Citizens pointed to the opposite. Its presidents never stopped modernizing or looking for better systems and services to offer.
To stay relevant, and to protect its customers and their money, the bank was consistently early to each new advance in commercial banking. Its headquarters, the tallest building in Paducah for decades, had been built by a competitor in the 1920s and bought at a distressed price out of bankruptcy in the 1930s. The bank kept the building sound without pouring money into its appearance, and put its resources instead into the systems that improved efficiency and the customer’s experience. Stewardship of that kind is easy to mistake for caution, but the label misses the point: lasting value grows from things that are not immediately visible, such as the long-term health of the local businesses and depositors a bank serves. The same holds far beyond banking, and it is often the advisor, rather than management, who is best placed to keep that long view in front of the room.
Lesson 3: The enterprise matters more than any single tenure
The hardest lesson is one I did not fully appreciate until I began the book. After more than a century of independence, the board and I made the decision to sell Citizens Bank, in part because a generation of shareholders was ready to realize the value the institution had built, and in part because a top-of-the-market price was too good to refuse. We sold to Mercantile Bancorporation of St. Louis for roughly $285 million, more than twice the bank’s book value, and the sale closed in July 1998. Letting go of something my predecessors had carried for over a century was the hardest thing I did as its leader, and the most clearly right.
What if I had said no? What if I had decided to stay on and keep Citizens independent indefinitely? Would that have served the community, the depositors, and the shareholders, or only me? Consolidation in banking had begun more than a decade before Mercantile came along, and it continues today. In the end, stewardship meant letting go, setting my own ego aside, and letting the needs of those constituencies carry the decision. The bank had served its purpose, brought prosperity to a small corner of Kentucky, and left a legacy of integrity and trust. The steward’s loyalty belongs to the enterprise and the people who depend on it, not to the person who happens to be holding the reins.
Leadership as a trust
So why did Citizens persist when flashier rivals did not? It was not sheer luck. Across more than a century, in very different eras, its leaders each treated the bank as a trust rather than a possession.
Most of us will lead or advise institutions we did not start and will not finish. The presidents whose portraits I set out to return never thought of themselves as the story; they saw themselves as custodians of something larger and older than any of them. Managing for the generation after the next, treating stewardship and value as one work, and putting the enterprise ahead of any tenure are as useful in an advisory engagement or a boardroom today as they were across those 110 years. Every leadership role is temporary. The Citizens Bank story is a reminder that the task is to leave it stronger than you found it, and to hand it on.