Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein: How to Build, Scale & Lead

Vlad, so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

The fact is, if I thought I was going to write a whole book, I probably never would have started. I sort of... well, first of all, I had time on my hands. A lot of stories roll around, kick around. Goldman Sachs has a big alumni network and we're all chatting, and so I started jotting things down. And I realized at some point, I said, you know something, I kind of wish my kids were really interested in my story, but they really aren't now. And then I thought back to my own family and I said, you know, I wasn't interested in my dad's story when he was still around to tell me about it. Now I wish I could. So I thought, you know, just let me start writing stuff for posterity and thinking that my kids would have it. I'd never publish. And then of course, you get invested in it, you start working on it, you show it around, and you know something, maybe it's there, maybe I can publish it.

Well, first of all, a lot of what I did, again, you know, this is Goldman, this is in the middle of finance. A lot of it is documented. A lot of it, you know, when you're CEO, you have a calendar, you can go over things. A lot of people remember it. It was also a period of time in which stuff is pretty seared in your memory. And again, this is not a formal history of the period. Everything in it is true, but it doesn't have to include everything. And so it's episodic. It's lessons through anecdotes, and the anecdotes are important, and the anecdotes are highly memorable to people who lived in this period. You know, I'll say another thing. When I first started to write this and I first started thinking that, gee, maybe there's a book in it, the first part of it went very... I actually put it down in the middle. I put it down for like a couple of years and then picked it up again because the first, let's say, quarter of the book was very easy to write because anybody who could contradict me was probably at that point. And then when I got to the part where people were still alive and sentient, God, it slowed me up a bit. And then of course, you go around and you talk to people, you ask them if their memory is the same as your memory. And I got some help in that. And I got reminded of things that I had forgotten about. And people told me that things that I thought I did remember may not have happened the way I thought about it. So I'd say it... I don't know if it takes a village, but in my case, I used a village.

Yeah. Well, I'd say, you know, I had a background that... look, I wasn't an immigrant. I didn't have to learn a new language. I didn't grow up in a war zone. But I grew up in public housing. You know, I had two parents who worked hard. We thought we were... part of the genius of America is everybody thinks, you know, at least in those days before it got as polarized as it is today, about 80% of the country thought they were middle class. We thought we were middle class. It's only now I realize we weren't middle class growing up in public housing the way we did. But I'll tell you specifically, there's benefits and burdens to every situation. If you grow up well-to-do and your folks are well-connected, a lot of the mythology of the world is taken away. You know, you don't have to wonder, gee, what does this guy know that I don't know? Because you've met these people. And if you come from a family background where people have gone to the best schools and are sitting on top of all these professions, it kind of demystifies the world for you. If you don't have that, the world's more of a mystery. But there are other advantages that come your way also when you grow up a little bit more striving, you know, less wealthy. One thing is you're not burdened by high expectations. So, you know, and I see it now with younger people, my own kids and other people, you know, people mark themselves to market against you. And I'm sure your audience must realize there's a lot of skill and smarts and hard work that go into success, but there's also luck that goes into success. You could be the greatest athlete in the world, but guess what? You don't peak in an Olympic year, so you never swim or run in the Olympics. You know, there's timing. There's a lot of things that go into life. So it's really unfair to hold people to mark themselves against people who've earned great success because some of it is that success is earned and some of it is a little bit of happenstance. So again, without the burden of that, I also didn't have to source my motivation. If you grow up well-to-do and you get your first apartment from your family and you don't have to work hard for subsistence, you know, a lot of people think it's a luxury to think, what shall I do with my life, or what do I want to do, or am I fulfilled? I wasn't burned by that naivety. If somebody offered to pay me 50 cents an hour more, I took that job because I was working my way through school after school loans became due. And again, sometimes choice is a luxury and sometimes choice kind of slows you up and gives you alternatives that are not valuable. What I had was I was ambitious and I was kind of driven mostly because I wanted to get out of the situation that I was in. So I didn't have to mark myself and say, gee, how am I going to be a CEO like my dad? That wasn't going to happen. When I was young, I wanted to work hard enough to get to an out-of-town college. When I got into school, I didn't want to flunk out. When I got out of school and went through law school, I took a job that would pay me enough to pay my loans. I never really had to look that far forward. And there's, you know, the advantages to that.

Look, I think people just have to have open eyes and open ears. When you get to a place, you know, once I look, I went straight through from college to law school. I was kind of youngish when I graduated. So there was plenty of time for experimentation, if you will. I didn't hate my career as a lawyer. I thought I could always have gone back to it. But again, I was pretty young and just listening to people around me. I was a career lawyer. I kind of like an ADD kind of personality, and the career that I eventually embarked on, which was more on the trading and sales side, I eventually ran Goldman Sachs, which is an investment bank, but I started on the trading side, and it kind of suited my personality and it suited my ADD, if you will, and my nervous energy. So it wasn't so much I was driven away from what I was doing. I was just open. And by the way, that was an unusual time because in my era, people had, you know, we would embark on a job, maybe switch jobs once. By the way, that's all I did is switch jobs once. And if you did more than that, people thought you were erratic and unreliable. Today, if you don't have four jobs in your first five years of employment, people will think that you have no imagination. I think that has changed a bit. People viewed stability in careers as an asset, and today people are more, you know, people think that you're kind of sojourning in a space, but it's more fluid, and people accept that, and employers accept that. And I'm not sure what's better or worse. I'm just saying it kind of changed. Again, the era was different. I also grew up at the tail end of the Vietnam War, and people were getting either drafted in some cases or working hard to be in a place where they wouldn't get drafted. And so as a result of that, your kind of early to late 20s was kind of like, you know, was kind of not, you weren't embarked on your permanent career at that point. You know, it was a time when it was explicit, almost explicitly for experimentation, because again, young guys my age were sort of, you know, we're just trying to find, you know, we're just looking for places. And again, that Vietnam-era attitude kind of permeated, and we're very, very remote from that now. So again, I practiced law for a while. I kind of saw where things would go there, and it was at a time when, you know, you had to sit, was I going to hunker down and become a partner in a law firm, or was I going to try something different? And this was as radically different, you know, this was just a different thing, and it was kind of a freebie. If it didn't work, I was young enough to just start over. See, today people get unnerved. People, you know, there are people out there saying, you know, you have to start your career, make your first billion dollars in your early 20s. And the really cool kids don't go to college at all. And they're told that that's a good thing. I think that's a terrible thing. I think people are being misled. I think to be successful in your personal life, it's good to be well-rounded and just knowledgeable about a lot of things, to be curious about a lot of things. And the more your curiosity gets, you accede to that and learn things, the more curious you become, and you become a better person. And I think even commercially, away from your individual satisfaction, people in this world want to deal with people who are interesting. And if you make yourself a very narrow world, even if you're 100 miles deep, you're going to be less interesting to a swath of people than if you read Shakespeare or learn a little bit of art history, learn about history. And I think also commercially, it's just better. The world changes rapidly, and you might as well condition yourself to what history teaches you, which is that history evolves. It doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And so knowing the way things happened in the past is good for you commercially for a very uncertain future that is sure to be different than the present.

Look, let me just say at the outset, I'm a bright guy. It would be ridiculous to say not to, given my academic background and what I accomplished in business. But let me be clear, I'm no genius. And that's important because how can somebody be inspiring to someone else if that person declares himself or the world declares him a genius? That means, well, only he could do it. It takes genius. And how many geniuses are there in the world at any given time? So I'll tell you what I don't have. It's not genius. I obviously was ambitious. I worked hard. I was certainly smart enough. But when I say to a number of people, when somebody tells me that someone's smart, I say, well, good. He's smart enough. A lot of people are smart enough. Then there are other things like it happens that I like people. I like engaging people. I'm curious. I'm curious about people. I'm curious of what they do. I'm curious when I walk on a street and I see what the name of the street is. I wonder who that person is or was who they named that street after. I watch a movie and I wonder what ever happened to that actor or actress from the 1950s movie that I'm watching on TV. I want to know how things are made, how things grow. And so that's helped me. By the way, it means that I can entertain myself because with Google or a chat box, I can always find things to learn. It means I never have to ask who I'm sitting next to at a dinner party because everybody knows something that I wish I knew better than I do. So I can find something to talk about with anybody. So I think curiosity is helpful. Work ethic is helpful. Getting along with people is helpful. At the end of the day, in your career, you should think of people's performance as kind of the algebraic sum of what they contribute and what positive or negatives they contribute or detract from the people around them. And so I think people who can organize a team, make good contracts with people, not explicit but implicit contracts that you work for this, you work hard for me, I'll support you and mentor you and help you. So I think that kind of attitude and appreciation of people, making people better than they otherwise would be. I used to say at Goldman, sometimes we'd have people that were just spectacular traders, but people hated them, and for good reason or this or that. And I used to say to them, and that didn't really work in a team-oriented place like Goldman. And I said to people, you know, you can live here as somebody who makes the people around you worse because they don't like working with you, but you have to be very, very, very, very, 10 more varies good at your job. Because if you're not that many varies and you make the people around you worse, it detracts from how very good you are. And you're better off, we'll both be better off if you separate yourself from us. So I'd say, again, curiosity, liking, being a person that people can engage with, working hard to satisfy your curiosity, having open ears and listening, and again, no substitute for hard work. And by the way, a sense of humor, because one of the most important virtues in the world is resilience. And if you live long enough, everybody gets knocked down. And you know, life... I shouldn't use sports metaphors because I'm a lousy sportsman, but in certain sports like golf, if you hit every shot, nobody hits every shot into the fairway. Whether or not you win or not is how you hit out of the rough or from a bad place or from behind a tree. And I haven't bowled in like 50 years. But in bowling, nobody throws a strike all the time. It's how you deal with the spare, how you deal with that. And so that's another important thing is how resilient you are. And appropriately in American culture, that's important. People admire people that get knocked down. I mean, would Steve Jobs ever have had the reputation and been Steve Jobs if he hadn't gotten fired and then had his big comeback? I think sometimes in life, getting knocked down is really a predicate for even greater success than what you had.