Summary:

The jury is still out on what the future of Goldman Sachs will look
like, but no one can argue that the 139 year old firm has been (and,
if Warren Buffett has his way, will be) the dominant investment
banker and dealer on Wall Street. What does Buffett see that we on
the outside do not? It’s all about the people. Charles D. Ellis has
written a landmark book that couldn’t come at a better time. THE
PARTNERSHIP: The Making of Goldman Sachs is the colorful and
fascinating story of Goldman’s rise to power through many
life-threatening changes in markets, competition, and regulation. It
tells the personal history of the men and women who built the world’s
leading financial powerhouse from a firm that was disgraced and
nearly destroyed in 1929, limped along as a break-even operation
through the Depression and WWII, and, with only one special service
and one improbable banker, began the rise that, in half a century,
took Goldman Sachs to global leadership. * Is Goldman Sachs really a
lot better than other firms at managing risk? The big difference is
in the cumulative power of many “small” details. The difference in
the speed, accuracy, and extent of communication inside the firm; the
difference in intensity, focus, and disciplined toughness of the men
and women hand selected to work there and real difference in
recruiting, training, and compensation. All add up to a decisive
advantage in management. Leaders and co-leaders manage Goldman’s many
business units with rigor and drive; risk management is the envy of
other banks; and coordination is powerful across business units and
markets around the world. As every Olympic athlete knows, such small
differences make all the difference between gold, silver or bronze –
or no medal at all. In the current, very difficult test, Goldman
Sachs has come in 1st – again. * Goldman Sachs is often described as
the best managed Wall Street firm. Is that true? Yes, it is true.
Goldman Sachs is the best managed “Wall Street” firm – and the best
led. Management is why Goldman Sachs is consistently rated the best
firm to work for and gets top ratings from clients all over the
world. Superior management is why the firm earns more profit,
develops more effective people, has made itself the market leader in
the U.S., U.K, Germany, France, China, Japan, and in most major lines
of banking business. No other firm comes close. One of the things you
will learn in THE PARTNERSHIP is just how Goldman succeeded in making
themselves different from any other Wall Street firm. They learned
early on that in order to survive, they had to not only make money,
but create a culture that was universal, that demanded absolutely
loyalty and, most importantly, act as one organism. * Why does
Goldman Sachs put so much weight on its “culture”? Goldman Sachs
culture works. In the complex, fast-changing, global, 24/7 securities
business almost all the important decisions are made in highly
specific and complex settings under great time pressure. These
decisions cannot be made by headquarters and they cannot be deferred.
They must be made locally by local market and business experts
thousands of times every day. Rules won’t work. If rules were written
for every type of decision in all those different businesses in all
the world’s different markets in all the different cultures, the
resulting Rule Book would be far too large and complex to read or
use. Culture – its way of working – is the universal “stem cell” that
enables Goldman Sachs to operate so forcefully in so many different
national markets and in so many different businesses. * With all its
different business activities all over the world, doesn’t Goldman
Sachs have problems with conflicts of interest? Yes! The firm
certainly has many, many conflicts of interest. While it could take a
defensive approach and try to avoid or minimize those risks of
conflicts, the firm believes the more realistic and effective
approach is to recognize those risks, be candid about them with
clients and counterparties, and actively manage the conflicts. The
firm strives to deal with each of them in such thoughtful and
effective ways that clients and customers will know Goldman Sachs can
be trusted to manage conflicts better than any other firm. This is,
of course, an assumption of enormous responsibility – particularly on
the scale on which Goldman Sachs operates – so it raises the obvious
next question: Who will watch the watcher?

Classification:

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Dewey Class: 332.660973 -- Financial economics

Book Details:

Physical Description: 6.2"x9.3"x1.7"; 2.4 lb; 752 pages
Edition Info: Hardcover; 2008-10-07

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•	Business & Investing -- Biography & History -- Company Profiles (1474)
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