A senior manager told Iain Martin, the author of Making it Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy being published next week.
“Somewhere in a warehouse are thousands of old flat-top RBS filing cabinets that were not Fred-compliant.”In pre RBS days as chief executive of Clydesdale Bank, Goodwin apparently interrupted a meeting to take a call from his mother who had seen a cigarette butt left on the steps of the bank’s headquarters in Glasgow. Goodwin immediately arranged to have the butt removed.
Sadly this obsessive attention to detail didn't manifest itself in the more "mundane" activities of the bank such as credit, risk and how much is lent and to whom.