Chaney's pick for the top job: a team player short on ego

On that basis it's fair to say that the day Chaney took the chair at the head of the boardroom table at NAB, the high-profile, flamboyant A-list banker who ran the Australian operations, Ahmed Fahour, never really had a chance at running the company.

While Fahour is very bright, well respected in banking circles and had achieved enormous career success at a relatively young age, he simply didn't have the personality traits Chaney thought appropriate to run a major corporation.

Instead, Chaney and the rest of the board (it's another team) decided to go with a 40-year-old banker, Cameron Clyne, with next to no operational management experience but who was "not burdened by a large ego".

He was also favoured by incumbent John Stewart, who had been tutoring him since bringing him on board four years ago.

Part of that teaching process involved sending Clyne to New Zealand to test his skills at running a stand-alone division. He passed the test with ease.

Clyne is undoubtedly talented, strategic and very capable, but he is still a somewhat unknown quantity to many.

When it was suggested to me back in April that he was the frontrunner for the job, I must admit to needing to look up the spelling of his name.

While not doubting the wisdom of the board's decision to appoint Clyne, it's a very tough time for even the most seasoned professional to be running a major bank.

The feel from banking analysts yesterday was that a fresh approach to running the bank may have been a good way to remove the odour of last week's $830 million additional provisions relating to American CDOs.

But Clyne is very much a team player. He admits freely to being part of the executive group that made decisions on risk, and that he completely supports the strategy and settings put in place by its current captain, Stewart (who incidentally is also short on ego).

Indeed Clyne is so self-effacing that he steadfastly refused yesterday to give his own views on any fresh changes he might bring to managing the bank - despite repeated attempts by analysts and the media to find out whether he would reduce its level of risk in the face of Standard & Poor's placing the bank on credit watch and raising the possibility of a downgrade.

Which brings us to the other great debate raging in the media right now - was Stewart's departure timing brought forward in response to last Friday's horror writedown announcement?

Chaney is adamant the timing was already in place. Certainly we knew the search for a replacement had been going on for a while, and that Stewart's departure announcement was to be made soonish.

Announcing a new management shake-up this week was certainly a convenient way to look like the bank had responded to its troubles.

The official line that it was merely coincidence is hard to swallow for anyone with a suspicious mind.

In much the same way, coincidence provides a pretty ordinary explanation for why Paul Oneile resigned as head of Aristocrat this week, the day before a major profit downgrade, and Geoff Dixon announced his departure from running Qantas a couple of days after a plane was forced to make an emergency landing with a gaping hole in its fuselage. (Seems to be a little too much coincidence in corporate Australia right now.)

In a sense, however, it's academic. Stewart was on the way out anyway, and in my view Clyne had the inside running since this process started almost a year ago.

He was clearly being groomed, and in the end he was the only contestant asked to go before the board and undertake the traditional interview on what he would do in the job.

Chaney said yesterday that there were three other internal candidates who could have taken the job if Clyne had been run over by a bus.

The headhunter search for outside candidates apparently yielded little fruit and none was interviewed.

Choosing a successor appears to have been a much more gradual process, in much the same way as the successor to Chaney at Wesfarmers, Richard Goyder, was chosen.

The market will be watching and evaluating Clyne and waiting to see the management fallout in the wake of his appointment.

We already know that Fahour was interviewed for the top job at Qantas, which suggests he is on the market as he must have known for some time he was not a chance to replace Stewart.