National Westminster Bank USA (NatWest) is a classic example of a company which has turned lackluster performance into strong performance. Through an aggressive and visionary COE (Bill Knowles) who was able to communicate his vision to the rest of the organization, the bank was able to change its entrenched corporate culture to be more responsive to customer needs and create an environment that fosters creativity and a high level of customer service. Knowles was able to accomplish this by building a management team that agreed with him in critical areas of how a company should be run and what the bank could be. This meant restructuring the bank's operations so that it did not try to compete in every major banking sector, but instead focused on four major areas. It also meant revamping the human resource function so that employees were seen as the most important asset of the bank and customers were viewed as critical to the bank's success. Instead of an environment that viewed customers as a necessary evil, the atmosphere changed to one where customers were viewed as the entire reason for the bank's existence.
When Knowles went to NatWest, it had recently been acquired by National Westminster Bank Group, an English financial institution with international operations. The bank's strategy was unfocused, and the bank participated against giants in the financial services industry. Employees were not motivated to provi
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