Sudden departures mean loss of road maps for Hong Kong companies

The departure of Ina Drew, Chief Investment Officer at JP Morgan Chase, reminds us that things move fast and mercilessly in the world of business. She had been with the company for 30 years. But as the senior manager in charge of the London group (including the colourfully named “London Whale” trader) who made the disastrous bets that caused the US$2 billion debacle, she had to go.

One of the very few high ranking female executives on Wall Street, Drew was considered (rather ironically) by some market participants as one of the best managers of balance-sheet risks and became CIO in 2005. She often featured on lists of the most powerful women in business, mentoring other women at the bank. The announcement of the losses that forced her hand to announce her retirement was sudden and abrupt. There are suggestions of clawbacks from her undisclosed retirement settlement, and possibly prior earnings and bonuses, to recoup losses for investors.

All of this makes the potential for Drew to be in the right frame of mind for contributing to the collective memory of the company highly unlikely. But given her three decades of involvement with JP Morgan, many of them at the highest level, she undoubtedly has valuable stories to tell – even if some of them amount to salutary lessons in how not to conduct business.

Drew has seen some key moments in the firm’s history, including the 1996 joint leadership of the first “century” bond for a sovereign borrower – a 100-year $100 million issue for the People’s republic of China – and the acquiring of U.K. investment bank Cazenove and Bear Stearns in 2008 and 2010 respectively. She has been a witness to a third of the company’s history in China.

This underlines the importance of having an active and ongoing programme of memory collection within companies at all levels, but particularly at senior management level, because fortunes can change swiftly and brutally. Hong Kong is a fast moving, dynamic and sometimes unsentimental business environment. With perhaps the exception of the more family-run firms, turnover of staff even at senior management level can be precipitous. But these sudden departures can often mean that the dearly departed carry with them part of the road map of how the company has got where it is. And sometimes not knowing where you have been can make it more difficult to know where you’re going.