Early in his career, Lloyd Blankfein was constantly judging the room and himself. Who shall I be this time? How shall I sound this time? He grew up in public housing in Brooklyn and arrived at Harvard feeling like an outsider. Then came the decision that would shape the way he carried himself for the rest of his career.
Somebody put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Lloyd, you may think you're changing, but everybody knows exactly who you are.' And so, I decided I might as well go with it because I'm not fooling anybody anyway.
For the future Goldman Sachs CEO, that meant stopping the performance and becoming more comfortable with who he was.
I think what's prized most in the world, whether people acknowledge it or not, is, you know, authenticity.
But as he rose through the firm, Blankfein also had to learn another lesson. To be a good teammate, you have to not only take criticism, but you have to be a little softer when you give it. These are Lloyd Blankfein's Executive Decisions.
Did you feel growing up, and in your early years, whether it was at Harvard, Harvard Law School, J. Aron, did you feel like an outsider?
Well, I did. I wasn't a lot like my classmates. I came from public housing, and I went to Harvard and I had roommates that had gone to private school. Yes, I was an outsider, I was a striver. And in my experience when I meet other people who are in senior positions all over, if you unpack their stories, you know they kind of were that way too. I think it's helpful in some ways.
But from a very early age you didn't let that become an issue, you didn't let that become something that kept you down. Actually, I think reading Streetwise, you used it to drive you on. Is that the case?
It did, and it gives you perspective. It also gives you, delivers you a higher EQ, Emotional Quotient, about people because you learn to read the room better because you're always very conscious, less about what you're communicating and really what the other person wants to have. You know, you become a little bit more of a pleaser and that helps you. I'm sure everything has a good side and a bad side. I'm sure it's burdensome in some ways and helpful in other ways, but can't help myself. I go into a room and I'm thinking how am I being perceived. I'm conscious you may not hear it as much as other people do, I have a kind of an outer borough New York City kind of an accent. I once said who shall I be this time? You know, how shall I sound this time? And somebody put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Lloyd you may think you're changing but everybody knows exactly who you are.' And so, I decided I might as well go with it because I'm not fooling anybody anyway.
Yeah. Let me talk a little bit about your earliest role models and I think they maybe came from your family. You've got this amazing grandmother who you were living with at one stage as well. You've got your father who worked in the post office, but a really hardworking guy and really helped drive you, and you've got your mom, you've got your sister as well who is I think eight years older than you?
Nine years older and was just a phenomenal person in bringing you up as well. Were these the early mentors?
You know, I hate to say it because it was such a good lead-in, but not really. From very early on, I really just wanted to get out of the neighborhood, get out of the context that I was in, go. And for me, the symbol was to go to an out-of-town school, to get accepted. It would mean, in my case, having to get a scholarship and go to an out-of-town school. And my parents, who I really, really appreciated, had a much tougher life. You know, they're blue-collar, blue-collar people, workers, laborers. You know, my dad didn't have a lot of opportunity, so I appreciated them, but they really weren't that much of a role model for me because I was trying to get into a different role. You know, you watch television, you see how other people live, other people, you know. I didn't know anybody who lived in a real house as opposed to an apartment in an apartment complex, but I aspired to all these things that you saw and I worked towards it.
So, it was you that drove yourself, not anyone particularly in your early childhood or your developing years?
I felt that way, I can't think of anybody who I aspired to be. I didn't know anybody growing up whose father went to work in a suit or you know wore a tie. I didn't have that stuff, so I always try, I mean I didn't affect that stuff, I just wanted to leave where I was.
I find that phenomenal. I've conducted 22, 23 Executive Decisions interviews now. People come from all kinds of backgrounds. One from a slum in Casablanca, another one from rural Kentucky where he was working in the garage at 13 and found it really tough, but they all had a mentor who said to them no, you can go and do this as well. So, for you to get to Harvard and then Harvard Law School purely on the back of your own drive, that is quite an incredible thing.
Well, I'm here. So, if I didn't have that, I wouldn't be talking, there'd be somebody else in this chair talking to you. I was always driven that way, yes, I was. But I mean it wasn't like, I mean I think I had a perspective on it, I think I had a sense of humor, I think if it didn't work out, I would have adjusted to it, but I was encouraged by incremental success. And so, I did well in school and, I mean I had people who helped me along the way. My high school didn't have a college office that would prepare you to apply to colleges. I went to a different high school just to go to their college night and there was somebody manning a booth who was representing Harvard and he gave me an application, he chatted with me and I filled it out. I filled it out like you'd filled out a landing form when you were coming into a country. These were meant to be essays and I just wrote it off my head. But I give university a lot of credit because they found me. You know, it's not done by statistics, they read your application, they give you an interview and I'm lucky they saw something.
When did you decide you wanted to go to Harvard? It doesn't get more blue blood as opposed to blue collar.
Oh, I decided why I wanted to go to Harvard when I got into Harvard. I never saw it before. I just applied to all the brand-name schools that I could. So, it was a bunch of Ivy League schools and then the state school of New...
Is it Yale that turned you down amongst others?
Yes, of course. I didn't get into all of them, you know, to this day I still have some admiration for them because they were smart enough, they turned me down, but I thought I would end up in a state school, which wouldn't have been so bad. And then, freakishly, I got into a couple of these Ivy League schools and that was a big moment and there was a lot of apprehension associated with it. I hadn't met anybody who'd gone to a school like that. And when I went there, I'm sure my roommates and friends that subsequently became friends thought I was a Martian or someone from someplace far away, but it worked out.
But you yourself felt like you were trying to fit in. You were buying Lacoste T-shirts to fit in. You were trying to buy the right suit, the right sports jacket to fit in as well. And then when you were going to friend's homes, you were like, 'Wow, this is phenomenal. I didn't know people live like this.' But when you brought them back, you felt very self-conscious, didn't you?
I did. And then I felt embarrassed with my friends, and then later in life, I felt embarrassed about having been embarrassed, because that was terrible because I felt, you know, was I being fair to my family and those feelings. And now I decided that I'm not going to be so hard on myself, and it's just a kind of a normal thing.
Right, I'm going to spin forward now. You've got your undergraduate degree at Harvard. You've done really well in Harvard Law School. You've moved on to a great company a little bit further down the line, Donovan Leisure. You're a successful, hardworking lawyer looking at kind of fairly dull areas, tax and what have you and looking at the nuances of tax, but you've made it. Why on earth did you look to throw all that away and becoming a trader or a salesman at a small brokerage?
Commodity? Well, I was working at that job, but I didn't love the job. And for me, it was a chore. I was living in New York. New York is a very finance-oriented town. So, I started applying for other jobs and those were jobs in finance. I started interviewing at this small commodity trading firm called J. Aron. And then during this elongated interview process Goldman acquired them, you know that was lost on me, I didn't even observe that, and it didn't really matter for a few years because it operated separately for a long time. But I joined this company, they gave me a job and it turns out in hindsight, I found this afterwards, they hired 20 people in the hopes that they'll have two at the end. And it was a trading environment, and you know rough and tumble and people were screaming at each other waving their hands and it was sort of like, believe me, that was an environment that I had grown up in and so I was quite comfortable with.
So you felt actually that your Brooklyn background, you'd kind of, 'I can do, this is way better than law just sitting there looking at complicated tax judgments as well.'
Yeah, I wasn't as analytic as that. In hindsight, yes, at the time I just said, 'this seems pretty good,' and frankly, the hours were shorter. I mean, the one good thing about being a lawyer in those days is that the hours were so long and sometimes there was a lot of drudgery associated with what you had to do that almost any other job after that would be lighter and merrier and would be a better lifestyle for a young associate trying to climb the law firm ladder. And so, when I went there, it looked better in a lot of different ways. I didn't know if I'd be good at it, and it turned out it suited my personality.
You were 36 years at Goldman's J. Aron, and it seems to me that you spent at least the first half of that career trying to justify the J. Aron operation to what was a very well-established investment banking operation at Goldman Sachs. You guys were always pushing against a glass-ceiling, or the Goldman's guys were on a better floor, and you guys were in a different building, and you had to convince Goldman's that actually, this was the way forward to become a bigger operation.
Well, there was a bit of a cultural difference between the firm J. Aron that I joined, the relatively small commodity trading firm, which consisted of a lot of people who were streety, not all of them had been to university and it was people who would kind of work their way up. A good entry-level job at J. Aron was to be the driver for one of the senior partners of the firm, so that shows you what the kind of career path was in that firm. Whereas Goldman Sachs was a very, very establishment kind of firm, where people had graduated from all the Ivy League schools and that was kind of the entry requirement to get a job at Goldman. So, there was a little bit of upstairs downstairs about Goldman Sachs and J. Aron. Of course, you know, I already had a chip on my shoulder and that kind of really reinforced it. And so yes, there was a little bit of trying to prove that we were good and frankly it didn't hurt us. Some of these things that you think of as burdens and disadvantages in the long run turn out to be advantages because we worked harder, took a little less for granted, were much more curious about learning about stuff because we didn't think we knew everything.
Were you successful sometimes in spite of yourself? A little bit later on you had to take on 360-degree performance reviews, and time and time again people would say that you were very combative, you didn't always listen to them, you talked over - sounds a bit like myself at work to be fair - but you talked over them. Were you successful in spite of yourself sometimes?
I put in a review, this is a 360, you know 20 different people, some report to you, some are over you, comment on you and somehow, they all came up with 20 synonyms for this guy really needs to change his behavior. Tough. I know people who are in very, very high senior places and I think boy, that person must have been voted most likely to succeed in kindergarten and every year since then. And there are some people who are later bloomers and who never thought themselves - and I was sort of in that latter category. In my life I've met some very, very accomplished, very, very smart people, but people throw the word genius around very, very easily. I've met people who've worked hard, who've done well, who had lucky opportunities and give them credit, they took advantage of those opportunities, but they weren't geniuses. They just applied themselves, they had their ears open, they had curiosity about the environment around them, and they saw things and they went through little doors that other people wouldn't have seen, and that's a point to make, that a lot of these opportunities are more accessible than you think. If you think that someone can only get to this spot because he's brilliant and genius and had this charmed life at every stage, you kind of give up. And so, part of this thing, an objective is, that my career is not only relatable but accessible. Statistically, not a lot of people are going to get those same kinds of breaks, but you can go pretty far in this world taking advantage of opportunities and working hard.
My own career in the city started very early on. I had a great role model, a man you probably know Jeremy Isaacs, who went on to Lehman's of course, and he was a great role-model, and I still speak to Jeremy and get advice off him to this day. Who was the best of the best that you listened to and used as a role model when you were at Goldman's J. Aron?
Yes. You know, and it's funny, little things make very important impressions. So, going back to my law firm days when I first went to, I said earlier, I never knew anybody who wore a suit. I went to the first boss I had in my law firm, this is the most useful thing possible, he told me how to dress better. I didn't know that you put little tabs in your collars to keep your collar down.
He told you to go and buy a few Hermes ties.
Told me to buy these ties and not those ties. Save your money. No, don't buy ten of those ties. Buy one or two of these. You know, people take an interest in small ways and those are the things that establish a good bond between people. I'm sure he taught me things related to the law, I probably would have learned those anyway.
I want to go to 1991. Robert Maxwell's ringing you up. One of the most important businessmen in the world. 'I want your advice, Lloyd', as well. You got a little bit flattered by him, everyone got flattered by him. Couple of months later, he's passed, whether he fell off his boat, no one knows.
Or pushed. But he was a crook.
Right. It turns out that Robert Maxwell was a crook. What did you learn from that relationship?
