What Happened To Goldman Sachs?

A former trader with Goldman Sachs, Steven Mandis, is now spending time at Columbia Business School, and has written a very business schooley book about change at the company.  It might be the kind of thing you’d like, if you like that sort of thing.  Peter Lattman provides the overview:

Mr. Mandis said that the two popular explanations for what might have caused a shift in Goldman’s culture — its 1999 initial public offering and subsequent focus on proprietary trading — were only part of the explanation. Instead, Mr. Mandis deploys a sociological theory called “organizational drift” to explain the company’s evolution.

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These changes included the shift to a public company structure, a move that limited Goldman executives’ personal exposure to risk and shifted it to shareholders. The I.P.O. also put pressure on the bank to grow, causing trading to become a more dominant focus. And Goldman’s rapid growth led to more potential for conflicts of interest and not putting clients’ interests first, Mr. Mandis says.

It’s coming out from and Havard Business Press Books, which is basically an arm of HBS’s distinctive revenue generator.  Most of that revenue comes from cases sold for b school classes, to be sure, but Mr. Mandis can hope that he will have a hit on his hands.