Head of the documentation unit

See also the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

The head of the documentation unit is an accursed person in an investment bank, although he is usually the last one to recognise this. This poor sod is responsible for the performance of the sainted men and women who make contractual flesh the fantastical aspirations of the credit department. The ISDA Negotiators.

One earns this Sisyphean task only to atone for a sin committed in a former life or as an act of spite, vengeance or perverse cruelty from someone else further up the organisation. Keep your friends close and — when it comes promotion time — your enemies closer.

In an investment bank, being a place of universal grasping fixation on advancement, it isn't hard to find a stooge to take the role: all you have to do is present it as a stretch assignment; an opportunity for advancement: managing three hundred people, in six centres across seven time zones, with a chance to overhaul a broken process and rock the house on a franchise-critical operational function. Who would not leap at that?

A person with a cautious or reflective nature. That’s who. When they come for you, ask yourself this: Why are they asking me to do this and not someone already in or with some understanding of the documentation unit? These people know something you don’t. Do not fall for their lionisation of your people management skills. IT ISN'T ABOUT PEOPLE MANAGEMENT.

Running the documentation unit is thankless not because of the negotiators — by and large, a perfectly pleasant, capable and long-suffering bunch, though not unknown to have cabin fever or the fractious personalities of dogs that have been kicked too often — but, because of its cost, heft, and inevitably negative impact on the franchise. The documentation unit is therefore an irresistible “cost centre” for change managers, management consultants,and chief operating officers to fiddle with. Offshoring, outsourcing, operations-aligning, automating — all of kind of easily spoken ideas will flood his feverish mind. It will not be his job to do these — a team of misunderstanding management consultants will do that, to the betterment of no-one but their own firm’s bottom line.

Their ideas, cribbed from academic texts and theoretical models which have never experienced the horror of peering into the depths of an ISDA Master Agreement, will override any more practical thoughts the poor head of the documentation unit might have had of her own to fix things. Any such ideas, however wise, will fail. but not before being systematically co-opted, amalgamated, misinterpreted, brutalized and finally forced through a sieve of business administration dogma until they are unrecognizable, unworkable, inexcusable, and yet still inextricably associated with the head of the documentation unit.

At that point (indeed, long before), he — or she — is generally regarded as a dead man walking.^[1]

Seen through the different prisms of the self-perpetuating autocracy, this is what the documentation unit means:

Sales: WHERE'S MY GODDAMN ISDA?
Credit: Whu don't we throw in an indemnity abd a unliaeral close out right? It won’t hurt to give it a try.^[2]
Chief Operating Officer: Who the hell are these people and why do they cost so much? Where are the economies of scale?
General counsel: This is what Sales, Trading and the Executive Management Committee has in mind when it thinks of my legal department. This aggrieves me. Maybe if I gave it a snazzy new name, like the Contract Negotiation Specialists Group, that would help?^[3]
Change manager: Here is an opportunity to right-shore and gain credit for delayering the organisation! I will be RICH!

Head of the documentation unit

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