Barclays gets social savvy – on and offline
AT this week’s Young One World summit in Pittsburgh, Barclays’ new chief executive Antony Jenkins revealed himself to be a Twitter devotee.
Jenkins told delegates: “I have a screen in my office that tracks tweets about Barclays. The day after the Libor scandal broke, we had 10,000 tweets and my computer screen was scrolling so quickly I couldn’t read the comments.” The Capitalist is just hazarding a guess here, but imagines that was probably for the best.
Meanwhile, less Twitter savvy but no less media friendly, the firm’s heads of behavioural finance – Greg B Davies and Emily Haisley – were recently photographed for a glossy spread in the November issue of Vanity Fair.
Referencing both Adam Smith and Keynes in their ode to understanding clients, the pair also made a particularly epic link between their role at the bank and Homer’s Odyssey: “Confronted with the fatal attraction of the sirens’ song, Odysseus tells his crew to tie him to the mast, which enables him to enjoy the sirens’ singing and short-term promises of a good time, without distracting him from sailing on in pursuit of his longer-term goals,” they say.
It sounds like the new boss’s recent orations on corporate culture are being well heeded.