Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs is without peer in the world of finance. And yet the mystery of how Goldman Sachs accomplishes record profits, year after year, remains. Working as a strategy consultant to Goldman Sachs for more than thirty years, Charles D. Ellis developed close relationships with many of the firm's past and present leaders around the world and gained extraordinary access to all aspects of the business. In The Partnership, he reveals the key events and decisions that tell the colourful, character-driven story of how Goldman Sachs became what it is today.

Starting as a sole proprietorship dealing in commercial paper in the mid-nineteenth century, Goldman Sachs became an innovative underwriter, struggled to survive the crash and Depression, and came out of World War II to complete what was then the single most important transaction in Wall Street's history: Ford Motor Company's IPO. Goldman Sachs overcame a full set of dramatic perils: Penn Central's bankruptcy, Robert Maxwell's abusive frauds, and insider trading scandals. Ellis uncovers how the firm's core values, intensive recruiting, entrepreneurial creativity, and disciplined risk taking laid the foundations, multiplied the firm's resources and profits and magnified its power to help it become what it is today: one of the most successful business organizations in the world.