The Elephant on the Dance Floor: How Herman Gref and His Team Are Teaching Sberbank to Dance

When reforming Sberbank in 2007, German Gref declared: “We must prove that elephants can dance.” The huge, lumbering Sberbank inherited, from Soviet times, crowds in the lobbies of queues, vicious front-desk employees, and out-of-date financial technologies. And this old-fashioned institution needed to be transformed into a worthy representative of the global financial elite. An unprecedented reform of a giant organization began. It is still far from finished, but both the process and the first results are astonishing.

To write this book, the author conducted dozens of interviews with Sberbank employees—from ordinary counter clerks to board members. The result is a real economic thriller that will be read with special interest by those who will have to reform their company. And also by those who ask the key question of Russian business: can something be made to work in Russia as well as in the West?