In this history of investment bank Goldman Sachs, Ellis (Winning the Loser's Game) covers the same ground as Lisa Endlich's Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success-with notable stylistic differences. From Marcus Goldman's purchase of his first commercial paper in 1869 to the firm's current success, Ellis's account is lively and engaging where Endlich's is accurate but dry. Ellis sheds light on events through dialogue and detailed descriptions of people's thoughts and feelings, embellishments that the author terms "recreations" in his epilogue. The effect of infusing such narrative techniques into the history of Goldman Sachs is entertaining, but it pushes the envelope of nonfiction, especially since the author appears to have interviewed only former partners of the firm. More damagingly, Ellis fails to report much about actual business, and attempts to do so-such as a chapter on Rockefeller Center financing-require lengthy digressions and are incomprehensible due to the complexities of the transactions. Without links to business, boardroom conflicts take on the air of petty squabbles. More a composite memoir of senior Goldman partners than a traditional history, this book will satisfy readers curious about the philosophies and personalities of the firm. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs
Narrated by Norman Dietz
Charles D. EllisUnabridged — 33 hours, 2 minutes
The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs
Narrated by Norman Dietz
Charles D. EllisUnabridged — 33 hours, 2 minutes
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Overview
As a strategy consultant to Goldman Sachs for more than thirty years, Charles D. Ellis developed close relationships with many of the firm's past and present leaders around the world. In The Partnership he probes deeply into the most important chapters in the firm's history, revealing the key events and decisions that tell the colorful, character-driven story of how Goldman Sachs became what it is today.
Ellis tells the illuminating stories of the great personalities who sowed the seeds of Goldman Sachs's success: from Sidney Weinberg, a junior high school dropout with a flair for markets; to Gus Levy, who brought a ferocious intensity to every minute of every workday; to John Whitehead, who wrote the core values that defined a culture of teamwork in serving clients; to the unpretentious John Weinberg, who was the quintessential relationship banker of his era; to Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson, who both became secretary of the treasury; to Governor Jon Corzine; and finally to Lloyd Blankfein, current CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs.
Starting as a sole proprietorship dealing in commercial paper in the mid-nineteenth century, Goldman Sachs became an innovative underwriter, struggled to survive the crash and Depression, and came out of World War II to complete what was then the single most important transaction in Wall Street's history: Ford Motor Company's IPO. Goldman Sachs overcame a full set of dramatic perils: Penn Central's bankruptcy, Robert Maxwell's abusive frauds, and insider trading scandals. Ellis demonstrates how the firm's core values, intensive recruiting, entrepreneurial creativity, and disciplined risk taking-incorporating technology and hard work-laid the foundations, multiplied the firm's resources and profits, and magnified its power until it became today's Goldman Sachs: one of the most successful business organizations in the world.
Editorial Reviews
Ellis, an author and former financial consultant, tells the story of how Goldman Sachs evolved from a sole proprietorship in the 1870s to today's global financial juggernaut. He works in profiles of dozens of the company's leaders, humorous anecdotes, and riveting details of financial crises. He tells how the firm has managed to meld teamwork with competition, a caring culture with high work standards, and making a profit with upholding its reputation. Always focused on recruiting the best people, Goldman Sachs, he explains, has used its intellectual capital to find and exploit widely divergent financial opportunities. From investment banking to arbitrage, from asset management to proprietary trading, it has cultivated success. While Ellis does not ignore some of the firm's unsavory episodes (e.g., insider trading accusations or its dalliance with the late master manipulator Robert Maxwell), he presents the accomplishments of Goldman Sachs as generally praiseworthy. His work is both an insightful company history and an enlightening view of the financial services industry. It is essential for all academic and larger public library business collections.
—Lawrence Maxted
Investment-strategy consultant Ellis (Capital, 2004, etc.) gives the financial powerhouse a largely bullish evaluation. His expansive appraisal does, however, report the bad times along with the good at Goldman Sachs. Ellis devotes a few conscientious pages to the firm's early years. Beginning in 1869, founder Marcus Goldman pioneered the resale of commercial paper and catered mainly to fellow Jews. After the arrival of son-in-law Samuel Sachs as a junior partner in 1882, the company expanded its reach and consolidated its prestige, moving into investment banking with the first public stock offerings of Sears Roebuck (1906) and F.W. Woolworth. & Co. (1912). The main focus of Ellis's illuminating text, however, is the preternaturally aggressive partnership's latter-day adventures as Goldman Sachs grew to be an international force in the last half of the 20th century. With only minor lapses into jargon, the author explicates with clarity and verve the fundamentals of risk arbitrage and block trading, mergers and acquisitions, retail sales, initial public offerings, equity underwriting, derivatives, arbitrage investment management, hostile takeovers and credit default swaps. He provides intriguing, specific descriptions of notable events like the collapses of tired old Penn Central and cocky hedge fund Long Term Capital Management. He chronicles the doings of swashbuckling brigand Robert Maxwell. He offers astute character sketches of the principal players, many of whom were sources: tough Gus Levy; "the two Johns" (Whitehead and Weinberg); Secretaries of the Treasury Bob Rubin and Hank Paulson; and Jon Corzine, who tried too soon to go public and ultimately departed for the U.S. Senate andthe New Jersey statehouse. Mapping the firm's tangled loyalties and fiefdoms, Ellis paints a Darwinian portrait of fierce competitors who played people along with the markets. Informed and accessible.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940171183134 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2008 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 1,168,679 |
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
This book was almost never written—several different times. In the winter of 1963 at Harvard Business School, I was, like all my classmates, looking for a job. My attention was drawn to a three-by-five piece of yellow paper posted at eye level on a bulletin board in Baker Library. In the upper left corner was printed "Correspondence Opportunities" and typed to the right was the name "Goldman Sachs." As a Boston securities lawyer, my dad had a high regard for the firm, so I read the brief description of the job with interest but was stopped by the salary: $5,800.
My then wife had just graduated from Wellesley with three distinctions: she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a soprano soloist, and a recipient of student loans. I was determined to pay off those loans, so I figured I'd need to earn at least $6,000. With no thought of the possibility of earning a bonus or a raise, I naively "knew" I could not make it on $5,800. So Goldman Sachs was not for me. If I had joined the firm, like everyone else who has made a career with Goldman Sachs I would never have written an insider's study of Goldman Sachs.*
In the early 1970s, while promising future partners that we would develop our fledgling consultancy, Greenwich Associates, into a truly superior professional firm, I had to laugh at myself: "You dummy! You make the promise, but you don't even know what a truly superior professional firm is all about or how to get there. You've never even worked for one. You'd better learn quickly."
From then on, at every opportunity I asked my friends and acquaintances in law, consulting, investing, and banking which firms they thought were the best in their field and what characteristics made them the best. Over and over again, well past the bounds of persistence, I probed those same questions. Inevitably, a pattern emerged.
A truly great professional firm has certain characteristics: The most capable professionals agree that it is the best firm to work for and that it recruits and keeps the best people. The most discriminating and significant clients agree that the firm consistently delivers the best service value. And the great firms have been and will be, sometimes grudgingly, recognized by competitors as the real leaders in their field over many years. On occasion, challenger firms rise to prominence—usually on the strength of one exciting and compelling service capability—but do not sustain excellence.
Many factors that contribute to sustained excellence vary from profession to profession, but certain factors are important in every great firm: long-serving and devoted "servant leaders"; meritocracy in compensation and authority; disproportionate devotion to client service; distinctively high professional and ethical standards; a strong culture that always reinforces professional standards of excellence; and long-term values, policies, concepts, and behavior consistently trumping near-term "opportunities." Each great organization is a "one-firm firm" with consistent values, practices, and culture across geographies, across very different lines of business, and over many years. All the great firms have constructive "paranoia"—they are always on the alert for and anxious about challenging competitors. However, they seldom try to learn much from competitors: they see themselves as unique. But like Olympic athletes who excel in different events, they are also very much the same.
Armed by Greenwich Associates' extensive proprietary research and working closely as a strategy consultant with all the major securities firms, I was in a unique position to make comparisons between competing firms on the dozens of salient criteria on which they were evaluated by their own clients market by market, year after year, and particularly over time. Over the years, I became convinced that my explorations were producing important discoveries that would be of interest to others who are fascinated by excellence, who retain professional firms for important services, or who will spend their working careers in professional firms. One discovery surprised me: In each profession, one single firm is usually recognized as "the best of us" by the professional practitioners—Capital Group in investing, McKinsey in consulting, Cravath in law (nicely rivaled by Davis Polk or Skadden Arps), and the Mayo Clinic in medicine (nicely rivaled by Johns Hopkins). And Goldman Sachs in securities.
Ten or twenty years ago, many people in the securities business would have argued that other firms were as good or better, but no longer. (Much further back, few would have ever chosen Goldman Sachs.) For many years, it has seemed clear to me that Goldman Sachs had unusual strengths. Compared to its competitors, the firm recruited more intriguing people who cared more about their firm. Their shared commitments, or "culture," was stronger and more explicit. And the leaders of the firm at every level were more rigorous, more thoughtful, and far more determined to improve in every way over the longer term. They took a longer horizon view and were more alert to details. They knew more about and cared more about their people. They worked much harder and were more modest. They knew more andwere hungrier to learn. Their focus was always on finding ways to do better and be better. Their aspirations were not on what they wanted to be, but on what they wanted to do.
Goldman Sachs has, in the last sixty years, gone from being a marginal Eastern U.S. commercial-paper dealer, with fewer than three hundred employees and a clientele largely dependent on one improbable investment banker, to a global juggernaut, serially transforming itself from agent to managing agent to managing partner to principal investor with such strengths that it operates with almost no external constraints in virtually any financial market it chooses, on the terms it chooses, on the scale it chooses, when it chooses, and with the partners it chooses.
Of the thirty thousand people of Goldman Sachs, fewer than half of one percent are even mentioned in this book, but the great story of Goldman Sachs is really their story—and that of the many thousands who joined the firm before them and enabled it to become today's Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is a partnership.
The legal fact that after more than a hundred years it became a public corporation may matter to lawyers and investors, but the dominating reality is that Goldman Sachs is a true partnership in the way people at the firm work together, in the way alumni feel about the firm and each other, and in the powerful spiritual bonds that command their attention and commitment.
The leaders of Goldman Sachs today and tomorrow may have even tougher jobs than their predecessors. The penalties of industry leadership, particularly the persistent demand to meet or beat both internal and external expectations for excellence—over and over again on the frontiers of competitive innovation—are matched by the persistent challenges of Lord Acton's warning: "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Three great questions come immediately to any close observer: Why is Goldman Sachs so very powerful on so many dimensions? How did the firm achieve its present leadership and acknowledged excellence? Will Goldman Sachs continue to excel?
The adventures that crowd the following pages point to the answers.
Charles D. Ellis
New Haven, Connecticut
June 2008
* John Whitehead and Robert Rubin have both included a few stories about the firm in their books but have certainly not tried to provide a complete picture. Lisa Endlich, a fine writer but with limited access to the full range of partners, wrote a thoughtful and wide-ranging study centered on the development of the firm in the 1980s and 1990s.
Bob Lenzner, a gifted writer for Forbes who had worked in arbitrage at Goldman Sachs a generation ago, started a book but set it aside, saying he didn't want to lose his friends at the firm.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Partnership"
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Copyright © 2009 Charles D. Ellis.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
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