I’m not writing fiction at the moment. I am suffering an overdose of reality. So here’s my two-pennyworth on changing banking culture, and why persisting in paying bankers excessively high salaries is fatally damaging to the world’s economy.

It is the work of ordinary folk that drives the economy. Not the gambling games of highly-paid men in sharp suits. It is our money - the output of manufacturing and agriculture, the services we provide and the goods we sell - that they are playing with. The growth of the modern economy is fuelled by consumerism - ordinary people buying things that in the past only the rich few could afford. If the divide between rich and poor continues to grow, that economic model will simply wither on the vine. A business cannot succeed if it has no customers, and if ordinary folk have no money, they cannot give businesses their custom. Simples.

Effective organisations focus on delivering value to their customers. They spend time, talent and resources understanding and anticipating what customers want and how they can provide it most efficiently. They grow and prosper because they always have the right products or services in the right place at the right time for the right price. This cannot be achieved without an effective team, effectively managed. We all work for incentives; but its only the highest paid who seem to think money is the only incentive. Most of us ordinary folk want decent pay for an honest day’s work. We want security, to safeguard our family’s standard of living. We like a job we enjoy, a job where we feel we are doing something worthwhile. A job where we can employ our skills and abilities to good effect.

The effective organisation is designed to give its workforce those incentives. If it means the top executives have to take a little less out of the pot to enable the rest of the team to deliver full value to customers, so be it. The system of risk and reward needs to be rebalanced - not least so that those who are paid very high salaries to fulfil responsible positions are held accountable for those responsibilities. Perhaps then they will take their responsibilities seriously. Chief Executives should know what is going on in their organisation, how effectively it delivers value to customers and whether risk is managed effectively. I personally do not see how it is possible for the CEO to have a clear grasp of value or risk when understanding of both is poor in lower levels of management. The information chain is only as good as its weakest link - and likewise the value chain.

The culture and focus of any organisation is shaped by its executive team. One effect of the skewed salary structure in many of our global corporates is the re-focusing of all activities towards achieving the executives’ bonuses - rather than towards delivering value to the customer. What you measure is what you get - so if your measure of success is the size of the CEO’s bonus, the CEO will get a massive bonus. Regardless of whether the business is a trainwreck or not. Is this the reason why insurance companies drive customers to the point of a nervous breakdown when we have to process a claim? The reason why a bank can with impunity cause not only inconvenience but real financial hardship to its customers through its own inept systems management? It should never have been possible for such catastrophic systems failures to occur, and “sorry” hardly seems an adequate response.

No organisation can be changed from the outside. The change is within hearts and minds. Until those who benefit most from the dysfunctional inequality of recent decades can be forced to face the reality that they did not earn the huge amounts of money they made and certainly have no right to expect to go on making it, we are - I fear - on a downward spiral to a very grim economic future.