regulators, policy makers, and economics and finance professionals. They focus on quantitative measures—such as imposing regulatory capital requirements or limiting activities to certain percentages—as the best way to prevent other crises.
The quantitative approach is reasonable, but it is not complete. Those trying to regulate Goldman and similar financial institutions have focused relatively little on the social activity, structures, and functions of their organizational culture—the hallmarks of the sociological approach—and I believe this focus will help get us closer to the root of the issues.
This book is based on my doctoral dissertation in sociology at Columbia, work that I started in 2011. It is the result of more than 100 hours of semistructured interviews with over fifty of Goldman’s partners, clients, competitors, equity research analysts, investors, regulators, and legal experts.32 I also researched business school case studies, news reports, and books about Goldman; quotations from those sources are peppered throughout the book. In addition, I analyzed publicly available documents filed by Goldman with the SEC (including financial data), congressional testimony, and legal documents filed in lawsuits against Goldman.
The purpose of going beyond interviews was to challenge, support, and illuminate the interviewees’ and my own conclusions. I suspect that many of the people to whom I spoke are bound by nondisclosure agreements, but I never asked. I did agree that I would keep their participation confidential and not quote them. I did not take notes during the interviews, nor did I use a recording device. The only interviewee whose name I disclose, with his permission, is John Whitehead. He worked at Goldman from 1947 to 1984. Since he wrote the original business principles, he was able to clearly describe what he meant when he wrote them and what the culture was like at the time.33
It is not my intent to glorify or vilify any individual, group, or era in Goldman’s history, although I suspect parts will be used to do so. I’ve tried not to be influenced by nostalgia for the Goldman that once was, and I’ve tried to recognize that the people I interviewed were looking back in hindsight and may have had agendas or other issues, something I tried to overcome by speaking to many different people and by balancing the interview data with other information and analysis. I’ve tried not to be affected by many people’s contempt for the firm or by the recent economic recovery. I have relied on publicly available data to confirm and disprove various claims and theories advanced by those I interviewed.34
I do not wish to assert that the change in culture at Goldman I’ve analyzed is necessarily change for the worse, or that the changes will lead to an organizational failure or a disaster (though some would argue that it does). The concept of drift, loosely defined, has often been used to study how a series of small, seemingly inconsequential changes can lead to disaster, such as the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger or the accidental shooting of two Black Hawk helicopters over Iraq in 1994 by US F-15 fighter jets. Though the change at Goldman is different in a number of regards from both of those examples, they do nonetheless offer important insights into why and how Goldman’s culture has drifted. In both cases—analyzed by Columbia University sociologist Diane Vaughan and Harvard Business School professor Scott Snook, respectively—pressures to meet organizational goals generally caused an unintended and unnoticed slow process of change in practices and the implementation of them, which in those cases led to major failures.35 Each tiny shift made perfect sense in the local context, but together they created a recipe for disaster.
My analysis also draws on the sociological literature about the normalization of deviant behavior, which illuminates processes by which a deviance away from original values and culture can become socially normalized and accepted within an organization. Another factor that clearly comes through is that Goldman’s business has become more complex, and that there is less cross-department and other communication, which contributed to what Diane Vaughan calls structural secrecy—the ways in which organizational structure, the flow of information, and business processes tend to undermine the understanding of change that may be taking place.35 (For more on these concepts and an academic study of organizational cultural drift, see appendix A.)
My argument, in essence, is that Goldman came under numerous types of pressure—organizational, competitive, regulatory, technological—to achieve growth, and that pressure, from both inside and outside of Goldman, resulted in many incremental changes. Those included changes in the structure of the firm, from a partnership to a public company, which in turn accelerated many changes already occurring at the firm. The change in structure also limited executives’ personal exposure to risk, as well as ushering in changes in compensation policies, which led to different incentives. The pressure for growth resulted in the mix of business also shifting over time, with trading becoming more dominant, which carried its own impetus for change. The growing complexity of the company’s business also led both to more structural secrecy and to more potential for conflicts of interest. At the same time the external environment was also rapidly changing and impacting the firm.
These and many other changes, added up over time, caused Goldman to drift from the original interpretation of the firm’s principles, most notably from the first principle of always putting clients’ interests first. As the firm got larger and growth became more challenging because of the law of large numbers, there was even more pressure to change the standards to allow the maximum opportunities. Those within Goldman were unable to appreciate the degree of change at the time, and are unable to now, due in part to a process of normalization of the deviance from the firm’s principles that occurred as those changes unfolded. That blindness (or willful blindness) to the degree of change was enabled in part by rationalization and also by the sense that the firm serves a higher purpose because of the good works of the firm and its alumni, which mitigated against recognition from within that the firm was engaging in conflicts.
Whether or not this process of drift is a harbinger of potential failure at the firm is an open question. Certainly there is reason to worry that the many interdependent and compounding pressures that led Goldman to slowly change and adopt its new standard of ethics from one that was a higher than legal requirement to meeting only the legal requirements will combine with its increasing size, more complexity, and greater interrelatedness, and the consequences will be an increasing risk of conflicts and organizational failure.
Since Goldman plays such a prominent role in the economy, as do other investment banks, this is an urgent issue for further exploration. Maybe even more so because I believe that Goldman is becoming even more important and powerful in our economic system. Goldman almost went bankrupt in the late 1920s, was struggling in 1994, and took government money directly and indirectly in order to hold off possible collapse in 2009 (Goldman denies this), even despite the profits or protection (depending on one’s view) from the infamous “hedging” bets taken against toxic mortgage assets. Many other financial firms disappeared, of course; the economy was near collapse, and taxpayers were left with an enormous bill. I hope the analysis in this book can demonstrate that sociology can contribute to the public understanding and debate about risks in the system.
I also hope the book will help leaders and managers consider the dangers that can accompany the responses to organizational, competitive, technological, and regulatory pressures in striving to meet organizational goals.
Finally, I hope the book is an interesting journey inside Goldman, with which I’ll also seek to answer a handful of questions that continue to nag other observers: why Goldman performed so well (relatively speaking) during the financial crisis, what role Lloyd Blankfein and the trading culture he is associated with played in the change, and why clients continue to flock to Goldman.
This book isn’t intended as a history of Goldman—there are several authors who have admirably tackled that job (and without which this study would not be possible)—but I have also included a Goldman timeline and short biographies on selected Goldman executives in the appendices to help a reader unfamiliar with Goldman’s history or people.
Part One
HOW GOLDMAN SUCCEEDED
Chapter 2
Shared Principles and Values
IN 1979, GOLDMAN CO-SENIOR PARTNER JOHN WHITEHEAD wrote down the firm’s principles “one