Goldman Sachs Insider Tale Doubles as PhD Thesis

When the latest Goldman Sachs tell-all landed on my desk, my first thought was that Greg Smith had come up with a sequel to Why I Left Goldman Sachs. But this latest addition to the Vampire Squid oeuvre is by Steven Mandis, a former Goldman portfolio manager who casts his insider tale as a more somber, studied look at the bank’s culture. His book, What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider’s Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences, has the added gravitas of being the basis for Mandis’s PhD dissertation on his former employer at Columbia University. That may explain why he’s supplemented his own tale of angst with SEC filings, interviews, and references to sociological research.

Mandis will likely generate less buzz than the ping-pong-playing Smith, who turned his good riddance memo into a New York Times op-ed before making it a book. But the two alums are united by more than just their mutual disappointment in Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein. Both men lasted about 12 years at Goldman, which may be equal to a lifetime of earnings for folks who don’t work on Wall Street. Mandis had a less explosive exit when he left in 2004 and joined hedge fund Halcyon Asset Management, where he did generate some headlines with a sudden departure in 2008. From there, he went to Citigroup before heading to academia to become a sociologist.