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BOOKMICHAEL SHANG · HIGHBANK PRESS · 2026

How Bankers Think.

The way commercial bankers actually think — the temperament the interview is really testing, made explicit.

INSIDE COMMERCIAL BANKING'S HIDDEN CURRICULUM

BY MICHAEL SHANG

Independently published · 370 pages

Buy on Amazon →The eight chapters ↓

Paperback, ebook and hardcover, on four Amazon stores. Read the opening first ↓

ABOUT THIS BOOK

There are many guides to breaking into investment banking. There are very few that take commercial banking seriously as its own intellectual discipline — with its own worldview, its own forms of judgment, and its own long arc of professional development.

How Bankers Think is built around a single argument: commercial banking is defined less by its technical content — learnable in a year — than by a specific way of looking at the world, which takes longer to develop and is the actual subject of every interview question, every credit committee, and every client meeting a banker will face.

The book makes that way of thinking explicit. Eight chapters move from the foundational worldview of commercial banking, through the specific instruments of credit judgment, into the deeper disciplines of declining and disagreeing — each chapter built around the frameworks senior bankers actually use and the dispositions they listen for. The eight are named and defined, with their parts, on the frameworks page.

WHAT READERS SAY

Four practitioners, quoted by name and with their written permission, as printed on the book: three on the back cover under PRAISE, the fourth across the top of the front.

How Bankers Think — the front cover, with Wayne Lee's endorsement across the top
How Bankers Think — the back cover, with the endorsements printed under PRAISE
The book, front and back: the same four endorsements as printed.

“I read How Bankers Think in one go. Michael Shang puts words around instincts that senior bankers carry but rarely articulate clearly. The Three Diagnostics don't feel like academic frameworks — they feel like how someone actually thinks after years on the job.”

— BILL LUO
Head of Finance, GFS AMENA & Global QSR, Fonterra Co-operative Group

“Michael Shang bridges accounting analysis and credit judgment with rare clarity. He shows readers how to look beyond reported profit to the cash conversion, working capital discipline, and facility structure behind every lending decision — essential reading for finance professionals.”

— WAYNE LEE
Partner, BDO New Zealand

“Most borrowers only understand how their banker thinks once a facility is under stress — by which point the conversation is much harder. Michael Shang explains that thinking before things go wrong. Clear, practical, and grounded in how lending decisions are really made.”

— CARLO WAN
Partner, Lane Neave

“A thoughtful and well-judged perspective on how bankers evaluate risk and opportunity. Michael Shang provides a clear and practical framework for understanding the considerations that sit behind formal credit processes and commercial lending decisions.”

— JESSE FAIRLEY
Partner, Russell McVeagh

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

  1. 01

    The finance student or career-switcher preparing for commercial banking interviews — who learned the standard frameworks, then discovered the interview was testing how to think, not what to know.

  2. 02

    The early-career junior banker, six to eighteen months in, who is noticing that the decisions they thought were technical are judgment decisions made under incomplete information — and wants the explicit version of what their seniors have internalized.

  3. 03

    The professional from outside banking — lawyer, accountant, corporate executive, policy adviser — who works alongside commercial banks and wants to understand how bankers actually think.

CONTENTS

  • Appendix A ·The Banker's Pocket Reference
  • Appendix B ·Checklists and Self-Tests
  • Appendix C ·Glossary

PUBLICATION DETAILS

Highbank Press · First edition 2026

Independently published · 370 pages

Paperback ISBN 978-1-0672833-0-8

Ebook ISBN 978-1-0672833-1-5

Hardcover ISBN 978-1-0672833-2-2

WHERE TO BUY

How Bankers Think — book cover

Paperback, ebook and hardcover in each store.

Buying for a course, a graduate intake or a reading group? Ten copies or more, with an eight-week reading guide. Already have it? The readers' page sets each chapter beside the cases on this site that practise it.

THE OPENING OF CHAPTER 1

You walked into the interview prepared. You knew the ratios. You had read the guides. You had a story ready for "tell me about yourself," delivered in ninety seconds, ending with the sentence about why you wanted to sit in this particular room. The senior banker on the other side of the table listened, nodded at the right moments, and moved on.

Somewhere in the first ten minutes, you began to suspect that what you had prepared for was not what was being tested. The questions were ones you knew. The answers were ones you had practised. And the room felt, in some way you could not yet name, like it was assessing something underneath the answers, on a register the answers were not really reaching.

You were not wrong about that.

The rest of the opening, free at Highbank Press — no address asked →

Reading this as the person the bankers are reading? The free companion page, How Banks Read You, works four files from the borrower's chair.

All cases in the book are composite illustrations, constructed for teaching. They reflect patterns observed across the author's sixteen years of commercial banking practice but do not represent any actual borrower, transaction, or institution.