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By Laurence Zuckerman
See the article in its original context from
October 16, 1994
,
Section 3, Page
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IT is Wall Street's most elite club, and every two years its new members are selected, capping months of anxiety with elation for the chosen ones. They are the new partners at Goldman, Sachs & Company, the last major investment banking partnership in America.
Goldman added to its inner circle last week, when the firm named 58 new partners, a record crop. They are mostly in their 30's, and nearly all men, plucked from the ranks of the firm's more than 9,000 employees. The partners do assume risk because, as owners, they share in losses as well as profits -- and this year has been a tough one for Goldman and the rest of Wall Street, as rising interest rates brought spectacular trading losses.
Still, being a partner at Goldman is about as close to a sure thing as there is anywhere in the business world -- a ticket to wealth and prestige. A Goldman partnership, says Samuel Hayes 3d, a finance professor at the Harvard Business School, is "the epitome of professional recognition on Wall Street." And financially, he adds, it is "the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."
Yet under the partnership pact, the partners have to wait for the pot of gold. The Goldman partners enter into a kind of Faustian bargain, exchanging years of exhausting toil and relative wage restraint for the lure of early retirement with multimillion-dollar payoffs. The new partners agree to work 12-hour days and more, some travelling constantly, always at the beck and call of the firm. An unwritten code of behavior applies as well. Teamwork and understatement are part of the Goldman ethos. Sharing credit for victories is appreciated. Flashes of ego are not.
Long hours and grueling travel schedules, of course, are routine in the upper echelons of investment banking. But the work regimen at Goldman is notoriously demanding and the partners are expected to pay that personal price.
Stephen Friedman, the firm's 56-year-old senior partner, who recently announced that he would step down at the end of November, explained, "I missed seeing my children grow up. I want to see my grandchildren grow up."
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