A Goldman Sachs Executive Explains His Resignation

This confession by a Goldman Sachs executive painfully gives his reasons for resigning his lucrative job at Goldman Sachs. He describes a culture that has eroded from one in which serving the customer was the right way to become successful, into a culture where the dominant goal is to get rich. The confession reads a lot like "Liar's Poker" which told a similar story about the culture at Salmon Brothers which led to its demise. I'm sure that there are many at Goldman who feel the same the way about the culture of the company. But culture has a strange way of influencing behavior. It can make bad things seem like good things to those who have absorbed the culture. How can things be bad when everyone does the same thing, and everyone gets handsomely reward for doing so? I'm sure that most of the writer's friends at Goldman will call him a traitor and refuse to accept the value system that they associate with "losers". There are winners and losers in their worldview, and the winners are meant to take advantage of the losers. Only jerks identify with losers.

This op-ed will cause the PR Department at Goldman to work overtime, but I doubt that it will have much of an impact on the culture at Goldman. I also doubt that it will affect Goldman's ability to attract recruits from the top colleges in America who have based many of their decisions on how to best land a job at Goldman or another investment bank that has a similar culture. That is where the gold is stored that must be captured to provide the "good life".