For those who study change management cases, they are often taught about the worst change management disasters in American business history. And there is a lot to study. However, there has been quite a bit of recent history regarding change management that no one is talking about yet.

After the fallout from subprime mortgages and the 2008 banking crisis in the United States, some researchers have backtracked on what caused some of this. Believe it or not, change management is one of the causes. In fact, at AIG, Hank Greenberg, the company’s founder, was forced to resign from his own company and pay a fine of nearly $ 1 billion from then-New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer. (We will not go into the Elliot Spitzer prostitution or abuse of power case here.)

What followed is now history, but it is a great lesson in change management and a good case study to follow. You see, after Hank Greenberg left the company, he was replaced by two gentlemen who decided it was a good financial move for the company to secure a giant mortgage package. By guaranteeing these pooled mortgages, AIG was taking significant risk.

It also allowed investment banking firms to sell packages of bad mortgages, which were not worth the paper they were written on. If a Greenberg hadn’t left the company, he certainly wouldn’t have allowed those loans to be underwritten by AIG.

This would have curbed abuse in the subprime sector and likely reduced the financial fiasco. When Hank Greenberg left the company, he left with his ethical values ​​and standards of integrity, which were not transferred to the new president and CEO. Think about this.