Ieri sul NYT e` stata pubblicata questa lettera . Le motivazioni per cui un top executive manager della banca d`affari Goldman Sachs ha rassegnato le dimissioni.
Leggendola, non ho potuto fare a meno di pensare a quante situazioni come questa ci sono nelle aziende di tutto il mondo . Oggi purtroppo , quello che conta e` solo il profitto, e ci si e` dimenticati del ruolo centrale del cliente .
Dobbiamo prendere in considerazione il fatto che siamo oramai ad un punto di non ritorno . Comprendere il prossimo e agire per soddisfare i suoi bisogni, saranno le colonne portanti per formare le nuove generazioni . Gli uffici del personale che al posto di valutare le qualità` delle risorse umane si ostineranno ad assumere carne da macellare per poi sputarla una volta esaurito il "gusto" , non faranno altro che accelerare il processo di disintegrazione del sistema .
Tra qualche giorno mi siedero` sulla mia panchina per rifletterci un poco e vi faro` partecipi del mio pensiero .
Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
By GREG SMITH
Published: March 14, 2012
TODAY is my last day
at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern
while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe
I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its
people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as
toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.
To put the problem in the simplest terms,
the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates
and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and
most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to
continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined
right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I
identify with what it stands for.
It might sound surprising to a skeptical
public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It
revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing
right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place
great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just
about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something
to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look
around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love
working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the
belief.
But this was not always the case. For
more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling
interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more
than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college
campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program
in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut,
out of the thousands who applied.
I knew it was time to leave when I
realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great
place this was to work.
When the history books are written about
Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd
C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture
on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber
represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.
Over the course of my career I have had
the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of
the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most
prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a
total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of
pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it
means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at
Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.
How did we get here? The firm changed the
way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an
example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm
(and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of
influence.
What are three quick ways to become a leader? a)
Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your
clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid
of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt
Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and
some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to
Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product
that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to
trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.
Today, many of these
leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I
attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking
questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the
most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on
one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress
was not part of the thought process at all.
It makes me ill how callously people talk
about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five
different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes
over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come
on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will
people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to
clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly
aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.
It astounds me how little senior
management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually
stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.
These days, the most common question I
get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off
the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear
reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they
should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a
rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the
corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting
paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.
When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t
know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces. I was taught to be
concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a derivative was,
understanding finance, getting to know our clients and what motivated them,
learning how they defined success and what we could do to help them get there.
My proudest moments in life — getting a
full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected
as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis
at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through
hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about
shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me
anymore.
I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of
directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without
clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the
morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And
get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons.
People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the
trust of its clients — for very much longer.
