Lloyd Blankfein’s Unapologetic Case for Goldman Sachs
The former CEO’s memoir Streetwise is a love letter to the firm that forged him and a defense of the culture that made it dominant.
Illustration: Richard A. Chance for Bloomberg
All the annoying things about Goldman Sachs — its swagger, its conflicts, its imperishability — are in Lloyd Blankfein’s memoir, Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs (March 3, Penguin Press). But something more is in a book that’s often funny, mainly blunt, unexpectedly vulnerable and rarely apologetic: a subtle explanation for the annoying things about Goldman Sachs and its success. Both, the book makes clear, come from the bank’s unique paradoxes and a culture that embraces those paradoxes in full.
Two disclosures: I worked at Goldman Sachs right after college, more than 30 years ago. And though I never met Blankfein there, I did interview him last year for a story. It helps to have Blankfein’s voice in your head as you read Streetwise. (The audiobook could help.) His dry, Jewish, Brooklyn, instinctively unimpressed point of view is a constant in his life and in the book.