STREETWISE: GETTING TO AND THROUGH GOLDMAN SACHS PB – BLANKFEIN LLOYD

When Lloyd Blankfein was attacked as a Wall Street fat cat, he had to smile, thinking of his precarious childhood in the notorious public housing projects of East New York, Brooklyn, and attending a high school so chaotic he didn t feel safe leaving class to go to the bathroom in his time there. Harvard University was a total moonshot, and his outsider status never wore off, there or at Harvard Law. When he struck people as street-y, it wasn t Wall Street they were thinking of. But if the chip never quite left Blankfein s shoulder, neither did a wry, resilient spirit and a lucid, democratic intelligence that saw through airs and found talent and ideas in unlikely places. Streetwise is a delightfully honest, sharp and often very funny reckoning with Blankfein s education – in finance, human nature and the workings of the world. It abounds with lessons about leading teams of brilliant, aggressive, competitive people and harmonising them around shared goals; changing when times are hard and when they re good; managing risk; and knowing a crisis is at hand before it swamps you so you can guide your team to the further shore. Blankfein is famed for his calm hand on Goldman Sachs s tiller during the global financial crisis, and that story is told in full here, among many other decisive episodes. A powerful blueprint for the wise stewardship of a cause that is larger than yourself, Streetwise will inspire and inform readers throughout the global business community and beyond.