–20
2015
0
20
40
60%
GOLDMAN SACHS
(TOTAL RETURN)
NOV. 7, 2019
23.5%
S&P 500 FINANCIALS
SECTOR INDEX
GOLDMAN SACHS STOCK PERFORMANCE
FROM JAN. 1, 2015, TOTAL RETURN
2016 2017 2018 2019
0
20
40
60
80%
2018
36.8%
2009
72.4%
SHARE OF NET REVENUES DERIVED FROM TRADING
2015 2016 2017 2018
SOURCE: BLOOMBERG
162
FORTUNE.COM // DECEMBER 2019
To certain board members’ horror, Solomon, who made $23 mil-
lion last year, habitually chooses to travel around New York City by
subway. “I mean, why wouldn’t you take the subway? No, seriously,”
he says. “It’s quicker and more efficient. You know, the mayor of New
York can take the subway. Why can’t the CEO of Goldman Sachs?”
Goldman Sachs, once a private partnership, has been a public
company for 20 years. Solomon has been saying he wants at long
last to run it more like one. Whereas Blankfein never dialed in to the
firm’s quarterly earnings calls, Solomon doesn’t plan to miss any. At
its investor day on Jan. 29, Goldman Sachs will welcome some 300
shareholders, analysts, and regulators inside its Manhattan head-
quarters for the first time and unveil Solomon’s new innovation:
a three- to five-year strategic plan. That may seem unremarkable,firm’s talent pool. “I don’t have any sense that
he’s a status quo kind of guy, which I give as a
compliment,” says Steve Friedman, who was
once CEO of Goldman Sachs and now serves
as chairman of Stone Point Capital, a private
equity firm.
When Solomon became CEO, Friedman ad-
vised him to preserve a “small core” of cultural
values, but that “everything else has to be sub-
ject to change.” Solomon has led by that creed.
In March, he tore up the firm’s age-old dress
code, a 35-page dossier with outdated stipula-
tions about suits, ties, and shoe color. And this
summer, Goldman quietly eliminated drug
testing from its employee background checks.
Gone, too, is the blanket ban on taking photos
inside the office, once enforced by building
security guards; Solomon now frequently
posts such pics to his Instagram account. “The
organization has a lot of bureaucracy I’d like
to simplify,” says Solomon (though he doesn’t
take credit for changing the drug or photo
policies). “I think we can do some work to be
more admired and respected, and a little less
envied and feared.”
Short of knocking down walls, he’s try-
ing to dispel the ivory-tower reputation that
Goldman has cultivated through a histori-
cally secretive and hierarchical culture. On
the mahogany-lined executive floor, Solomon
chafes when visiting colleagues are asked to
sit in the waiting room; he insists they be
allowed to bypass two layers of receptionists
and knock directly on his door. He prefers
getting his own coffee and showing up unan-
nounced at divisional meetings, and rejects
prepared talking points. “He hates any sort of
idea of Praetorian Guard, by any name,” says
John F.W. Rogers, the firm’s chief of staff. At
a firm that has for decades primarily commu-
nicated with its 38,000 employees via mass
voicemail, Solomon asked his staff to find a
way to convene a global all-hands Silicon Val-
ley–style town hall in Goldman headquarters’
11th-floor “sky lobby” (between the elevator
banks and the cafeteria) so that he can hold
them impromptu. (The company abandoned
the idea after the logistics of coordinating its
73 offices proved too difficult and costly.)
From Storied to Stumbling
Financial regulations and automated trading have hurt Goldman
Sachs’s performance, turning its stock into a laggard.