Bill Cohan, Columnist

Power Grab Gone Wrong Doomed Goldman's Evans

TheÂ announced year-end retirementÂ of J. Michael Evans, the 56-year-old vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., sends the not-so-subtle message to the firm's rank-and-file that in GoldmanWorld, raw power grabs are frowned upon.

October 21, 2013 at 11:19 PM UTC

By Bill Cohan

William D. Cohan, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the author of the forthcoming "The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities," as well as "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World" and the New York Times best-sellers "House of Cards" and "The Last Tycoons." Cohan is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and writes frequently for the Financial Times, Fortune, the Atlantic and the Washington Post. He worked on Wall Street as a senior mergers and acquisitions banker for 15 years. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and Columbia University Graduate School of Business. "The Last Tycoons" won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

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If you ask me, theannounced year-end retirement of J. Michael Evans, the 56-year-old vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., sends the not-so-subtle message to the firm's rank and file that in GoldmanWorld, raw power grabs are frowned upon, regardless of the extreme level of talent possessed by the person doing the grabbing.

Evans, you may recall, was a co-chairman of the high-profile internal "business standards committee" established in 2010 after the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Senate's Permanent Committee on Investigations called into public question whether the firm was adhering to the first rule in its playbook: Clients always come first.