InsideWaMu

As WM gears up for the July 22nd earnings call, compiling earnings and writing out the press releases what song do you think Kerry, Tom and TPG are jamming to this weekend on floors 31-33 (while NOT drinking the recently discontinued 31-33 floor executive water)?  Here’s my vote:

So this is my first post.  A little about me, I’m one of the many blue-shirt wearing businessmen you see walking into WaMu Center each morning.  I more or less enjoy my job, still have a fair amount of my youthful idealism left and still believe WaMu can be a great company although it is in dire need of change.  I can pretty much guarantee you’ve seen me in the building and you may even know me, let’s just hope you don’t recognize my writing style.

I decided to start this website today after a particularly brutal week at work.  We all know WaMu is hurting right now and needs changes.  We also all know that Project Restart is a joke in how limited its scope was.  Impacts were somewhat noticeable in Treasury, on 15th floor and in parts of Home Loans, but come on … other than the Stockton move I’ve heard less than 15 people in Retail segment were let go?  Are you kidding me?  I came home and googled around for some additional WaMu discussions online and found a pretty sorry lot of messages here and here.  However in the later postings on this website I found what I was looking for.  Intelligent and informed conversation about WaMu, what’s working, what’s not.

My hope is this blog can be a place where lively, intelligent, informed opinions and insights about WaMu with a very healthy dose of cynicism and sarcasm (both strongly encouraged) can mix and entertain.  But believe it or not the ultimate goal is to better WaMu through fleshing out ideas, ways to improve, and exposing the flaws of our favorite company, all while staying civil and intelligent.  Sounds Pollyanish, but as long as there’s a little youthful optimism left in me, I’ll hope for the best.

Feel free to email me at flash@insidewamu.com - no information/opinion is too trivial.  I’ll try and post regularly for a few weeks and see what happens.  If it takes off, great.  If not then I guess there’s just not that big of a market in WaMu talk.  I’ll consider the blog a success if some of the discussions on here are implemented and WaMu becomes a better bank.

So here’s a couple topics to get started:

• WaMu needs to reduce employees dramatically.  It’s simply too big and bloated - particularly in the headquarters positions.  A smallish project Restart is not good enough.  Imagine if overnight every headquarters employee with a UID ending in an odd number was let go this weekend (or even number, whatever).  How would the bank function differently on Monday?  Think specifically about the team you’re on.  If you were down to 4 instead of 8, would the critical items required of your team to make the bank a success still get done?  Yes.  Would the BS projects, multiple Starbucks trips and “make busy” meetings with no purpose/action items and other non-value adding functions go away?  Yes.  Would it materially affect revenues?  No.  Would it materially affect expenses and resulting profits?  Absolutely.  In fact the remaining employees would probably be able to get sizable raises since company would no longer need to subsidize non-value adding employees ala Soviet Union in the 80’s.
• Related to above: What % of people that you deal with on a day-to-day basis add no value to the bank?  If you were in HR how would you devise a system to identify these people and get rid of them?  I have a couple ideas I’ll share over next few days because it’s clear that simple performance reviews don’t work when you have employees noses up their managers asses and other managers blindly obsessed with building FTE empires regardless of how their team performs.
• If you were Kerry for just one day what would be your #1 priority?
• Onto the lighter stuff: Do you believe Steve Rotella is a “sleeper agent” from Chase sent here to help lower the bid Chase will eventually need to buy us?  (I don’t buy this one, but love some of the conspiracy theories I’ve heard at work)
• And just how much $ does the Starbucks in the lobby make each day?  Is it the most profitable Starbucks store in the world?