Lloyd Blankfein’s latest career advice is simple enough: care about your coworkers, guard your reputation, and remember that every employee contributes to the firm’s culture. It’s good advice. The question is whether it applies equally in both directions.
Blankfein illustrates his point with an example of older and younger employees. His message is that experience shouldn’t cause you to underestimate someone earlier in their career. Fair enough.
But the omission is striking. He says nothing about race. Nothing about gender. Nothing about employees who believe they’ve been marginalized by the very institutions asking them to protect the firm’s reputation.
That’s not a criticism of the advice itself. It’s a criticism of how comfortably abstract corporate values become when they avoid the hardest conversations.
“Care about your coworkers” is easy to write in a memoir. It’s much harder to measure inside a boardroom.
Reputation, according to Blankfein, belongs to everyone. One employee’s misconduct can damage the entire organization. That’s funny.
When an institution damages an employee’s reputation, who repairs it?
When an employee believes they have been treated unfairly, who protects them?
When a worker spends years trying to obtain records, answers, or accountability, where does corporate concern for “coworkers” begin and end?
When the person who severely damages the institution’s reputation is the CEO himself, who holds him accountable?
Those questions are noticeably absent. I ask them because they are not hypothetical to me.
Blankfein writes that caring about coworkers and protecting the firm’s reputation are core values. My experience led me to question both.
In January 2016, I lost my job at Goldman Sachs under circumstances that I have challenged for years. Based on the sequence of events, the records I have reviewed, and information I have received over time, I came to believe that my termination was not simply an isolated employment decision, but part of a broader effort to place pressure on Robert D. Boroujerdi, a senior executive with whom there was a mutual romantic interest, to leave the firm.
Lloyd Blankfein personally made that decision.
The strategy backfired when Mr. Boroujerdi, realizing what was being done, refused to leave. In so doing, his decision to stay initiated a cover up at Goldman Sachs that the firm has repeatedly reinforced over the years and as of this writing, is ongoing. Mr. Boroujerdi has steadily documented the misconduct, and every necessary authority has been monitoring the situation for years.
If my understanding of the events is correct, then the principles described in Blankfein’s memoir stand in stark contrast to the decisions that affected my career.
“Care about your coworkers” is a meaningful principle only if it applies when an employee becomes inconvenient.
“Protect the firm’s reputation” carries equal moral force only if the firm is equally committed to protecting the reputations of the people who work there.
Corporate values are not tested when business is booming and everyone is applauding. They are tested when leadership faces difficult choices involving real people. That is where values cease to be marketing and become measurable.
Goldman Sachs has spent decades cultivating one of the strongest brands in global finance. That reputation wasn’t built solely on financial performance. It was built on trust. Trust from investors, clients, regulators, and employees.
But trust isn’t maintained through speeches or memoirs. It’s maintained through conduct.
When employees raise uncomfortable questions, institutions reveal their values not by the slogans they publish, but by how they respond.
History offers several examples where employees challenged Goldman Sachs and prevailed after years of litigation, including the Chen-Oster gender discrimination litigation, which resulted in one of the largest employment discrimination settlements involving the firm. Whether one agrees with every allegation made in those cases is almost beside the point.
The point is that institutions often ask employees to protect the firm’s reputation while resisting scrutiny of their own decisions. That asymmetry deserves discussion.
Blankfein writes that you should care about your coworkers. I agree. But caring isn’t demonstrated when everything is going well.
It’s demonstrated when someone’s career becomes inconvenient.
It’s demonstrated when someone raises concerns that threaten powerful interests.
It’s demonstrated when the easiest path would be silence.
Corporate values are easy to articulate. The harder question—the one every institution eventually faces—is whether those values survive contact with adversity. Because reputation is not what a company says about itself. Reputation is what remains after people begin comparing the public message with the historical record.