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Informationen zum Autor Charles D. Ellis is a consultant to large institutional investors and government agencies. For thirty years he was managing partner of Greenwich Associates, an international business strategy consulting firm he founded that serves virtually all the leading financial service organizations around the world. Ellis earned his M.B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from New York University. He has taught investment management courses at Harvard and Yale and is the author of twelve books, mostly on investing, and has written nearly one hundred articles for business and professional magazines. Ellis has served on the boards of Harvard Business School and Phillips Exeter Academy. A past trustee of Yale University and Chair of its investment committee, he is trustee of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, director of Vanguard, and chair of the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research and consults on investing with major institutions in Asia, Europe, and North America. Klappentext The inside story of one of the world?s most powerful financial Institutions Now with a new foreword and final chapter, The Partnership chronicles the most important periods in Goldman Sachs?s history and the individuals who built one of the world?s largest investment banks. Charles D. Ellis, who worked as a strategy consultant to Goldman Sachs for more than thirty years, reveals the secrets behind the firm?s continued success through many life-threatening changes. Disgraced and nearly destroyed in 1929, Goldman Sachs limped along as a break-even operation through the Depression and WWII. But with only one special service and one improbable banker, it began the stage-by-stage rise that took the firm to global leadership, even in the face of the world-wide credit crisis. Introduction This book was almost never written—several different times. In the winter of 1963 at Harvard Business School, I was, like all my classmates, looking for a job. My attention was drawn to a three-by-five piece of yellow paper posted at eye level on a bulletin board in Baker Library. In the upper left corner was printed "Correspondence Opportunities" and typed to the right was the name "Goldman Sachs." As a Boston securities lawyer, my dad had a high regard for the firm, so I read the brief description of the job with interest but was stopped by the salary: $5,800. My then wife had just graduated from Wellesley with three distinctions: she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a soprano soloist, and a recipient of student loans. I was determined to pay off those loans, so I figured I'd need to earn at least $6,000. With no thought of the possibility of earning a bonus or a raise, I naively "knew" I could not make it on $5,800. So Goldman Sachs was not for me. If I had joined the firm, like everyone else who has made a career with Goldman Sachs I would never have written an insider's study of Goldman Sachs.* In the early 1970s, while promising future partners that we would develop our fledgling consultancy, Greenwich Associates, into a truly superior professional firm, I had to laugh at myself: "You dummy! You make the promise, but you don't even know what a truly superior professional firm is all about or how to get there. You've never even worked for one. You'd better learn quickly." From then on, at every opportunity I asked my friends and acquaintances in law, consulting, investing, and banking which firms they thought were the best in their field and what characteristics made them the best. Over and over again, well past the bounds of persistence, I probed those same questions. Inevitably, a pattern emerged. A truly great professional firm has certain characteristics: The most capable professionals agree that it is the best firm to work for and that it recruits and keeps the best people. The most discriminating and significant clients agree that the firm consistently delivers the best s...
