Challenges of expansion
Medlin emphasizes that size is not everything in banking, and that expansion can challenge a company's value structure and quality of service.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with John Medlin, May 24, 1999. Interview I-0076. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
Again, I think as I
indicated earlier, we have our own strategy, philosophy, values, so
forth. Size, once you reach a critical mass, size is sort of on top of
that is not important. In fact, it can be a negative. All I know is the
best job I ever had was managing North Carolina, managing Wachovia when
it was just in North Carolina. It was easy, not easy, but you could
possibly cover the state, know the political leadership, the community
leadership, know our people. When Georgia came, I had to give up some of
that. That you had to move up a level, and you couldn't know everybody
quite the way you knew them before. Then you've got another state, and
the quality control gets more difficult. Our own strategy and philosophy
and values I think are our, work to our disadvantage when it comes to
size because first of all there's nobody else that does those things as
well as we do. It takes a while to have a cultural transformation,
values transformation to do as well. So it, for us it limits how fast
you can grow. The fact that others have done it faster and are bigger,
really you can't say you don't think about it, but you also can say
after thinking about it a little bit and reminding ourselves what our
religion is, then it's not something you have to worry about.