the Banana economy

I've seen this pattern enough times across banking, government, and education sectors to know the sequence is surprisingly predictable. Revenue pressure arrives first, leadership starts using softer language to describe harder realities, restructuring rumours begin floating around corridors like cigarette smoke in an old casino, then everyone acts surprised when the layoffs finally happen.

The signals were already there.

But here's what I got wrong about the Minions the first time I saw that poster.

I assumed they were fragile because they seemed so indiscriminately loyal. Gru, then Vector, then whoever shows up with a plan and a lair. They flip-flop so fast that the obvious read is instability. Actually the opposite is true. The Minions survive precisely because they're not attached to any particular boss. They carry their capabilities with them. They adapt quickly, rebuild under whoever the new leader is, and keep doing what they've always done: improvising, constructing things, breaking them accidentally, recovering. Their culture doesn't live inside Gru's lair. It travels with them.

I've watched something similar play out in organisations, and it's more instructive than it first appears.

When I joined National Bank of New Zealand, the bank had its own distinct feel. Lloyd's Bank in the UK was the parent company, but the place felt genuinely New Zealand throughout, in the customer service, the premises, the way people operated day to day. Then ANZ purchased it from Lloyd's. Two cultures formed immediately, National Bank people and ANZ people, Kiwi versus Australian, and there was quiet friction about which way the merged entity would settle. The conventional expectation in any acquisition is that the larger institution absorbs the smaller one. ANZ had the capital, ANZ had the scale, ANZ held the cards.

A few years in, ANZ adopted National Bank's culture and processes, at least in New Zealand. The combined entity was rebranded ANZ National Bank, and when the "National" eventually got dropped, the National Bank way of operating had already absorbed much of the new structure. What tipped it wasn't sentiment. During the integration, when branch premises were rationalised, the National Bank locations were consistently preferred over the ANZ branches next door, even though they had been direct competitors. National Bank had ranked higher in customer service surveys among New Zealand banks for years. The culture had something real underneath it, and that's why it outlasted the acquisition.

Strong culture shows up in the survey results. The poster is decoration.

BNZ had a similar internal split. The traditional IT department sat alongside BNZ Digital, which ran at a different pace, with different tools and a different sense of urgency. Two technology camps inside the same institution. Eventually the digital culture expanded into the broader technology function, and what tipped it was the same thing: the digital team was delivering. Mobile and desktop banking services were moving. The other side was not moving at the same rate. Cultures that produce results tend to absorb the ones that don't, whether or not the org chart has caught up yet.

Inland Revenue is where this became personal.

I introduced the Toyota Production System there, quality control circles, metrics on the wall, team huddles running across the supply chain process, working out loud. A senior manager came to me directly. "Hey Wayne, we don't do agile here in Inland Revenue." I said I was doing TPS, not agile, which didn't land the way I intended. A couple of years later that same manager was pursuing her MBA and carrying Mary Poppendick's book on lean software engineering. She had converted. The person who told me not to implement agile became its advocate, without ever quite connecting it back to what had already been running in our team. The irony was manageable. Production priority one incidents dropped while I was there. The method proved itself, and methods that actually work tend to win eventually, even if the timeline is annoying.

Many people described me as a job hopper over those years because I moved from one organisation to another every couple of years. I understand why it reads that way from the outside. The honest explanation is that I carried a specific set of capabilities into different environments to solve particular problems, and once the problem was either solved or stuck, the case for staying weakened. This is the Minion model, whether I intended it that way or not. You accumulate skills, deploy them wherever you land, and you don't require the organisation to validate them for you. The skills travel. The org chart doesn't.

Most people bind their professional identity too tightly to the employer's brand. When that brand disappears in an acquisition or a restructure, they lose the thread of who they are professionally. The Minions never had that problem. They were always themselves, regardless of who was holding the freeze ray.

Back at ANZ in technology, we had adopted the startup culture trappings: drinks on Friday afternoon, biscuits, coffee available throughout the day, the general ease of a place where people felt comfortable. It felt good. Then the Global Financial Crisis arrived and the budget tightened fast. The Friday drinks stopped. The biscuits stopped. The sense of shared ease got quieter without anyone announcing it.

Same at BNZ Digital later. Things were good while they were good. Then they weren't. The drinks dried up.

Nothing in an organisation is actually free. The bananas are always funded from somewhere, and when that somewhere tightens, the bananas are among the first things to go. Organisations that use perks as the primary signal of culture have nothing underneath when the perks disappear. The ones that survive downturns are the ones where the culture exists in how people work, not in what they're served on a Friday afternoon.

I guess the deeper point is this: before accepting the bananas, spend some time understanding who is paying for them, how sustainable the system is, and what happens when conditions change. Every business cycle eventually turns. Every organisation enters a different season. Strong cultures survive because the fundamentals underneath them are real, and people who survive transitions are the ones who built something portable, not the ones who waited for the lair to stay stable.

The Minions will probably be fine. Kevin will become a motivational speaker somehow, Stuart will join a terrible garage band, and Bob will accidentally build a successful kombucha startup without understanding basic accounting.

Life moves on.

The bananas, unfortunately, do not last forever.