Lloyd Blankfein’s Streetwise was just published and as of this writing is on Amazon’s “Top 20” bestsellers list. [Streetwise: Getting to and through Goldman Sachs, Penguin Press New York: 2026]. I just finished it. I cannot recommend it.
Slow down! How dare I criticize the career memoir of one of the most prominent business leaders of the past few decades, merely the Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs from 20006 to 2018, through some of the most turbulent financial markets since the Depression? I have nothing remotely approaching such credentials.
Yet my primary loyalty remains to you, my readers, and despite the high expectations I had for a still-current memoir of one of the most prominent business leaders of our 21st Century, I frankly disagree with the all-stars heartily endorsing the book, including:
- “Scary smart.”—Warren Buffett
- “Packed with important lessons about leadership, risk-taking, decision-making, and giving back.”—Michael Bloomberg
- “The best tool kit I’ve read about how to navigate going up the ladder in corporate life and how to lead and manage big business.”—Barry Diller
- “Truly frank books by Wall Street giants are rare. But Lloyd Blankfein has written one. I highly recommend this.”—David Rubenstein, cofounder and cochairman, the Carlyle Group.
Certainly Streetwise starts off with great promise. From the Preface:
“…the events I witnessed, and perhaps slightly influenced, remained at the center of political conflict and change. The global financial crisis and its aftermath continue to reverberate. Would we have as polarized a society, would we have a Donald Trump, had we not had the crisis, the bank bailouts the reaction, and the reaction to the reaction. […] Goldman holds a unique place in the world of finance, and a uniquely distorted place in the I imaginations of many people. I accumulated a lot of experience managing and leading a firm that attracts top talent and top egos…I learned the hard way about reputational risk, how to deal with the politics, the press, and the public, all while keeping the firm on mission and maintaining morale. […] If my story has wider implications, it’s because it’s really about striving, humility in the face of an unknowable future, resilience after disappointment, resolve and optimism in crisis, and the universality of human nature—even among the very rich and successful.”
Great, borderline profound, stuff; and from someone who had a ringside seat and at times was in the ring. Alas it doesn’t, to my ear, deliver.
What does Streetwise, then, do? It recites, in 350+ pages of detail, the blow-by-blow events of a 50-year career. And it ought to be a great story: Blankfein rose from the deteriorating public housing projects of East New York, Brooklyn and the South Bronx to Harvard and Harvard Law and on from there. You would hope Blankfein would take the opportunity to reflect and philosophize about what distinguishes those who rise spectacularly above this emphatically unpromising childhood from those who stay mired in it.
Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying: Some of the events on the ground that Blankfein went through were seismic in their financial and sociopolitical repercussions. Being called to a windowless conference room at the headquarters of the NY Fed on the Friday evening before Lehman collapsed—along with the CEOs of Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, Barclays, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and more (pp. 261 et seq.) is as close to being “in the room where it happened” as you can get. And this Murderers Row of Wall Street power players, each at the top of an influential powerhouse firm, have to be intrinsically fascinating human beings. But even that higher-than-high-stakes 72 hours calls forth from Blankfein a cold, dry recitation of “just the facts”—no human color. These men (shock, all men) remain black and white line drawings. A missed opportunity.
So: Read it for witness to history if you like, but don’t read it for character or color or philosophical reflection.
[Imaginary] Debt Crisis/Fed Summit [courtesy Gemini image generator]
