1. A friend of Smith’s characterized his resignation and public condemnation of Goldman Sachs as the “ultimate act of loyalty.” What did he mean?
2. a. What did Smith mean when he spoke of Goldman Sachs’s “culture”?
3. a. Would that approach work in the marketplace? Explain.
“It makes me ill how callously people still talk about ripping off clients,” mid level Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith wrote in The New York Times as he was resigning from the firm in 2012. Smith’s commentary, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” claimed that the Goldman Sachs culture had become “toxic,” and that the “interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money.” Smith, 33, a Stanford graduate and finalist for a Rhodes scholarship, wrote that he was once proud of Goldman Sachs’s culture of teamwork, integrity, humility, and concern for clients, but that spirit, he said, had been lost.