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In 1986, the Standard Chartered Bank was in the midst of an acute crisis. The lethal combination of a culture that reflected its colonial past, a strategy of unfocused expansion, and an organisation that lacked basic discipline had led the company to a situation in which it was losing about £300 million a year and faced a hostile takeover bid from Lloyds Bank. A decade later, Standard Chartered was delivering one of the highest returns to shareholder equity among all financial services institutions in the world and was a star performer within the FTSE 100 index of major UK-based companies. The case describes the radical changes in strategy, organisation and culture that enabled this transformation. It also identifies the major challenges that the management of Standard Chartered was confronted with in 1996 - challenges that were very different from and also, perhaps, much more complex than those they dealt with so successfully over the preceding decade.