Citibank: A Century in Asia

This was commissioned around the centenary of Citibank's first Asian branch, and a commissioned corporate history is friendly by construction. Nobody writes a hostile account of a company that paid for the book, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

What you get anyway is a hundred years of one institution operating across a set of markets that went through occupation, independence, currency crises and several complete reinventions, which is a longer continuous run than almost any business you can study. Read it for the endurance rather than for the judgement, because the judgement is bought and the endurance is real.