高盛的企业文化：百年基业的韧性与传承

Thank you very much. Good afternoon everybody.

I'm delighted to be here.

Nikolai, thank you for having me.

I enjoyed the evening last night and and delighted to be in Oslo today.

I've been asked to talk a little bit about culture at Goldman Sachs and on this theme of durability of an enterprise.

Goldman Sachs has been around for 156 years and I am incredibly proud to steward that organization.

But it is certainly clear to to me and to the leadership of Goldman Sachs broadly that it's very unusual for a company to survive for 156 years.

There aren't a lot of them.

The culture of Goldman Sachs has evolved over a long period of time.

And as I think about how to articulate some aspects of it that might help you understand how we think about it at the firm, I'm reminded of a story that highlighted for me at a different stage in my career how important culture was in the durability of an organization.

I was promoted to run investment banking in 2006.

Before that time, I did not spend a lot of time talking to outside investors.

But when I was promoted, I started to go see investors to talk about that business, which is a very important business for the firm.

I was in Boston meeting with a big shareholder of the firm, and he was drilling me on a number of different areas of how we were running the business.

And I was listening very carefully as I heard,"Well, why aren't you doing this and you should be doing this and why aren't you doing that?"

And after about 45 minutes, I said to him, "I appreciate all the questions. Why do you own the stock? Why do you own Goldman Sachs?"

And he looked at me and he said, "That's simple. I believe you have one of the most strong, enduring, differentiated cultures."

"And when you look at my five core holdings in my portfolio, they're all companies where I believe that to be true because a strong enduring culture leads to better relative performance over time."

And I never forgot that.

And I went back and I thought a lot about some of the things that differentiate Goldman Sachs.

So in the few minutes I have today, I wanted to point to a couple of things that I think our organization has gotten right over the years that have made a difference for us.

First, we went public after 133 years in 19 99, 26 years ago.

The leaders at the time did something that was different.

They didn't just go public. They went public, but said, "We're going to retain a partnership structure."

At the time, everybody said, "Well, you can't do that anymore. You're no longer a partnership. You're a public company."

But the leaders at the time said, "We're going to value this partnership because the partnership allows us to live to and collaboratively support the values of the firm."

What are the four principal values that Goldman Sachs strives to live to every day?

Client service, partnership, integrity, and excellence.

And there was a view that if we took in our population, at the time that we went public, it was 13,000 people. in that 13,000 people and we identified the top one one and a half% as true leaders to carry the firm forward. If we could retain that, the firm could be a differentiated and more powerful organization.

So over the last 26 years, we've retained a partnership.

It's not a pure economic partnership like a traditional partnership in a law firm or what Goldman Sachs was before.

But every two years we elect new partners and those partners which are approximately 1% of the firm lead this organization forward.

We take it very seriously.

There's a collaborative nature. It's about subjugating your own interest for the interest of the whole and we work hard to protect it and invest in it.

What's an obvious way to see the investment that goes into it is to look at the process we use to select those partners every two years.

There would be lots of ways that you could do this, but we've developed a process that really goes back to when it was a true partnership.

We've developed a, for a lack of a better term, unique process of what we call crossruffing.

What is cross roughing?

We organize a group of partners to go out and talk to all the existing partners of who they want to bring up into the partnership.

And so last fall, as we do every two years, a group of 40 partners went out and interviewed 360 existing partners and did over a,020 to 30 minute interviews to basically look at approximately 160 candidates to ultimately choose 95 to enter this partnership.

And despite the fact that we're a public company, the aspirational nature of participating in this partnership remains incredibly high and the effort that goes into these selections is incredibly rigorous.

That's an investment and a representation of how important we as a firm take this and I think it's one of the reasons why this is perpetuated for 26 years as a public company.

I can't think of another public firm that has something that looks quite like this, but it works for us and we're going to continue to invest in it because at the end of the day, the 460 partners that we now have of Goldman Sachs wake every day feeling like they have a leadership ownership interest in doing the right thing to drive the firm forward.

Now, when you talk about culture and how culture sustains itself, one of the things I've learned over time is you can never take it for granted and you have to constantly invest and reinvest.

The pandemic was a very difficult time for all of us.

It was a particularly difficult time for professional services businesses and Goldman Sachs is a professional services business.

At the end of the day, our business thrives on people being together.

Our business thrives on apprenticeship.

One of the things that's unique about Goldman Sachs, we have 47,000 employees. 50% of them are in their 20s.

The culture and the ecosystem of the firm is that young people come to the firm to learn, to be mentored, to be groomed.

A small slice of them stay and develop their careers. The rest of them go out in the world to do other things.

That is our model.

Pandemic very tough on that.

And just culturally our firm is one of constant open transparent dialogue, collaboration, getting different views.

You know, of course on video you can do some of that, but it's not the same.

As we were coming out of the pandemic, we felt that the culture of the firm had lost a step.

And so a group of us as leaders sat down and said, "How can we reinvest? How can we reinvigorate? How can we take an action that will send a message that we're deeply committed at a time like this to strengthening our culture?

So, we came up with a program that we called the cultural stewards program.

And we decided that we were going to take all the partners of the firm. We were going to put them in cohorts of 25 people.

And over the course of a 15-month period of time, we were going to force every cohort to go offsite for two days to talk about the importance of the culture, their responsibility in stewarding it, and what were the actions that they could take to reinvigorate it and continue it.

And so over a 15-month period of time, we set out the partners to do that.

And I made a commitment to go have dinner, a two to three hour dinner with every single one of those cohorts all over the world.

And I did that not so I could communicate my strong passion for our culture, but rather I could listen to every single one of them communicate to me as the leader of the firm why they thought it was important and what they thought needed to be done to continue to strengthen it going forward.

It was a difficult 15 months from a travel perspective, but it was one of the most enriching things I personally have done during my seven years as CEO.

The learnings I took away, but the reinvigoration, the re-energizing of our culture permeated through the organization.

And this army of 400 partners that went through this program loved it.

And they went out as an army into the firm to the other 45,000 employees and basically took on their responsibility to talk about and support that culture and invest in it.

And so it was a great example of taking a conscious effort to say this is important.

We're going to take time and we're going to arm our leaders to go out and push that down into the organization.

And it worked incredibly incredibly effectively for us for our organization.

Another important part of our culture that we have to live with and think about and worry about every day is risk management.

We are at the end of the day a financial institution and we do have a 1.7 to$ 1.8 trillion balance sheet and we are a risk-taking business.

We take risk, we respond to risk, we have to manage risk.

There are all different ways that organizations try to deal with the risk that they take on.

But for us, the collaboration, transparency, and kind of intellectual rigor around which we try to develop a culture of risk management in every daily interaction has been paramount to trying to make better decisions rather than bad ones time and time again.

Now, of course, if you want to risk business, you're going to make mistakes. You're going to make bad decisions.

The question is, when you make a mistake, how do you respond to it?

How do you create a culture where people run to problems instead of looking to point others towards problems?

How do you create a culture where everybody believes that if they see something that's not right, they believe it's their inherent responsibility to elevate it, shed more transparency on it, and make people more aware of it.

You do that by every day thinking about those things, talking about those things, incentivizing those things, and rewarding those things.

And our culture of risk management has been deeply, deeply important to our firm's success over a long period of time.

One of the things that all of us at Goldman Sachs are humbled by is the fact that we've been around for 156 years.

I keep in my office a copy of the perspectus for the Ford IPO which was in the 1950s.

One of the reasons I keep it and I look at it periodically is because if you look at that perspectus, okay, there are very few companies on that perspectus that still exist today.

The financial services industry is filled with companies that come and go.

In fact, even more recent to that point, if you go look at the Goldman Sachs perspectus, when Goldman Sachs went public 26 years ago, there were 13 companies on the cover, I believe only four of them still exist today, one being Goldman Sachs.

So, it's a very dynamic industry and at any point in time, if you don't have the right culture of risk management, your viability is threatened.

And so, that's why we spend a lot of time focusing on that.

The last thing I want to touch on from a cultural perspective is this foundational value of client service.

We are a client business.

Our business rises and falls with the experience our clients have when they interact with the firm.

If we don't wake up every day trying to really think about how we can enhance the experience our clients have with us, we will not strengthen and grow our business.

One of the things we're incredibly proud of and I think it's a great lesson in trying to simplify messages to get a result to incentivize a result is a program that we launched on October 1st, 2018, my first day as CEO that is called one Goldman Sachs.

This was an experiment that in the months leading up to this leadership team starting in October 2018, we said that we wanted to find a way to really improve the client experience our clients were having at the firm.

And we said one of the things that was happening was our clients were getting bigger and more complex and they were touching the firm in lots of different ways.

So we said let's do an experiment.

Let's take the 30 largest, most important clients of the firm and let's put them in a pilot and let's call that pilot one Goldman Sachs and let's announce that we're going to incentivize the organiza incentivize the organization to improve the experience of those 30 clients and let's see what happens.

Well, the funny thing about one Goldman Sachs is you don't really need to put a paragraph underneath it for everybody to know what it means.

It's a very simple statement. one Goldman Sachs.

And everybody had their own interpretation of what that meant and how to execute on it.

But the result was extraordinary.

The organization kind of got behind it. Everybody wanted to participate.

And so now one Goldman Sachs has become a cultural operating ethos.

The program for clients that started with 30 now has 130 clients that are a part of the program.

But the whole firm inside and out operationally with all clients whether they're in that program technically or not thinks about delivering a one Goldman Sachs coordinate experience that always starts with how does the client experience us and how can we make it better.

It's been hugely successful and I think it's a great example of if you want cultural change, create a message that everyone can repeat over and over again, that everybody can grab on to and where people can understand clear, definable results.

So what I've tried to do in 10 minutes is give you a couple examples of how passionate we are in using the culture of the firm, these four fundamental values to protect and enhance our business.

I think it's hugely important.

I think without that focus, our business would not be as strong as a business it is as it is.

But we do not take it for granted and we wake up every day knowing that we have to continue to do that if we want to sustain Goldman Sachs for generations ahead.

Thank you all very much and have a great day.