culture they wanted to strengthen. But they also felt, particularly
in light of the firm’s rapid growth and increasing globalization, that
the apprenticeship model needed to be augmented with more for-
mal approaches. The need for leadership development had simply
outstripped the supply of experienced mentors.
As a result, in 1999 (also the year in which Goldman Sachs
became a publicly traded corporation), a small task force composed
primarily of business leaders was formed to benchmark other firms
and decide how the firm should address the issue. After four
months of study, the group came back with a set of recommenda-
tions, which led to the creation of a small group called Pine Street,
named after the historic Wall Street–area headquarters of the firm.
In its benchmarking visits, Goldman Sachs was attracted to the
leadership development approach at General Electric. It subse-
quently hired the head of GE’s leadership development center at
Crotonville (Steve Kerr, coauthor of this chapter), to lead a group
of eight professionals who reported directly to the firm’s executive
officer. The group’s mission centered on leadership development—
“to make the development of outstanding leaders a core compe-
tency of Goldman Sachs,” as joint chief operating officer John
Thornton put it^1 —and on the goal of disseminating internal and
external best practices.
One of the early tasks that Pine Street set for itself was to agree
on a set of internal “running rules” that outlined how the eight
professionals in the group would work with each other and with
their partners and clients within the firm. The basic premise
was simple: the way the group works should reflect the concepts it
seeks to teach. These running rules sought to model core strengths
of Goldman Sachs in areas like client service and professional
expertise while also putting in place some ideas that were less
ingrained in the culture, such as boundarylessness and a “volun-
teer” staffing system. These rules (see Exhibit 29.1) have been a
useful tool in maximizing the productivity and job satisfaction of
the group.
DEVELOPING ALEARNINGCULTURE ONWALLSTREET 321