Getting the Sach.

Last week, professional medium shot and aspiring big shot Greg Smith decided to quit his job. He did this trashing his bosses and their company on the New York Times' editorial page. This is less antagonistic than burning the building down, but only just.

There's this idea that Smith is some kind of hero for taking a principled stand against the culture of corruption on Wall street and for valuing his integrity over the dumptruck full of cash that his evil overlords were paying him to sit on paperwork every day for twelve years. And, yes, I suppose he does deserve some recognition for eventually deciding that taking the economy by the neck and throttling it like a Christmas goose might not be the best way to spend your time on this earth. Eventually.

It's not that I hold Smith's time at Goldman Sachs against him now that it's over, it's just that I can't quite shake the feeling that, even with his "Take this job and shove it," attitude, he's still giving us an unduly rosy picture of the way things work behind the curtain. But you don't have to take my word for it, let's hand things off to Mr. Smith:

"Thank you."

***

Plain = Smith

Bold = Me

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs.

Oddly, this narrowly beats out "Today is the first day of the rest of your life," in tshirt sales.

After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

Note that the wording here indicates a nominal level of destructive toxicity that has now been exceeded.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

This is the same speech I gave when I cancelled my membership at the video store.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success.

I think you misspelled "blackmail."

For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

A couple more years of this and Invisible Children was liable to make a video about him.

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

Well, that and the fact that Bud Fox was wearing a wire in the park.

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars.

Question: How hard is it to get the smell of assholes off of yourself?

If you want to be liked, you should probably take this image off your business cards.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

That ax murderer policy seems a little unfair. Who's to say ax murderers can't be successful executives? Let's call in Patrick Bateman, see what he thinks.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? A) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit.

When he said "execute" I really thought the end of the sentence was going to be "your immediate supervisor."

B) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them.

But you went to work on Wall street anyway. Gotta say, this feels like it's on you.

C) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Tar?

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

Buddy, I'm a man from earth who has never sat in on one of these meetings, and I believe that even without being told.

Also, if I were an alien from Mars, I'd probably have other things on my mind, like "How the hell did I get here?" and "How can I possibly have existed on a planet whose atmosphere is almost entirely CO2?" You know, big picture stuff.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids?

I'd like to nominate this as the greatest sentence ever composed by an MBA holder. Not even being sarcastic here, that was just awesome.

Pictured: The actual vampire squid that now has Greg Smith's old job.

I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

Let me translate: "I don't know of any illegal behavior, just standard practices that would be illegal if our lobbyists didn't give incredible handjobs."

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

This process seems needlessly complex; isn't there any way to get rid of the Muppets and get paid just for eyeball ripping?

When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces.

Wow, Standford's reputation must be incredibly inflated.

My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.

I'm sorry, go back for a second; table tennis? At the "Jewish Olympics"?

...don't get me wrong, it's impressive. I mean, I couldn't do it. But, well, it ain't Rhodes Scholar, if you catch my drift.

I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist.

No sooner did this see print than a huge wing of most major financial institutions went to work solving the pesky problem of needing clients.

***

So what's my problem with Smith? Seems like a stand-up guy doing the stand-up thing. And to a degree, he is...but it's an underwhelming standard. I mean, when did this guy start at Goldman Sachs, 2000? Was the 2000 Goldman Sachs some kind of Candy Land of integrity and moral fiber? Really? Saying you quit Goldman Sachs after twelve years because you finally realized they were motivated by greed is like saying you finally quit the Klan because it dawned on you they were a little unfair to black people.

"All I'm saying is, things are starting to feel a teeny bit totalitarian around here. I mean, I can't be the only one feeling this way, am I right?"

You'll notice he doesn't tell us exactly when everything went to shit either, it's just "these days", in contrast with the halcyon days of yore. It also seems telling that, according to Smith, Goldman has lost its way only because of disdain for its clients, not because it's, ya know, a virulent plague on the entire world's financial system, a flesh-eating devil fish that strips everything it touches down to the marrow and converts it into toxic poo that contaminates entire swaths of ocean. Evidently it's fine with Smith if Goldman acts like the economic hantavirus that it's always been, if only they would go back to being nice to the customers while they do it.

Economic problems aren't institutional, according to Smith, it's just a question of atmosphere. As soon as America's most influential assholes remember that it's better if they all get together and fleece the world as a team rather than at each others' expense, everything will be just fine and dandy again. This is what happens when the 1% try to relate to how the rest of us feel about them. I can't help but feel like I'm watching Thurston Howell III try to have an awkward male bonding moment with Gilligan. I mean, okay, yes, he quit, and then he had the chutzpah to talk about it. I like that, honestly. Just don't pat him on the back too hard; he might break something.