How to avoid the Goldman Sachs blunder in your organisation

As Robert Thorton, CEO, Anytime Bank (You can bank on us: in good times and bad), read through the New York Times, his mood darkened. He marched out of his office.

“Get Cooper and Shaw,” he snapped at his secretary; then walked to the office of Mark Bedflow, his human resources manager, and pushed open the closed door. Ignoring the young man who jumped to his feet at his entry, he barked: “Mark. My office. Now.”

“Bob, I’m interviewing candidates. Can it wait?”

“No.”

Bedflow followed Thorton to his elegant office, where Bill Shaw, the senior managing director of risk management, and Chris Cooper, executive director, finance, were already seated.

“Have you guys read the article by Greg Smith, who quit Goldman Sachs yesterday?” asked Thorton.

“Yes!” said Cooper, laughing and picking up the newspaper, “What a hilarious nut! Listen to this: ‘It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off.’ The man must have been sick all the time! And then he says: ‘Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them.’ Old-fashioned, Greg?! You’re a dinosaur!”

“Exactly, but I didn’t call this meeting to have a laugh with you, Chris.” Cooper stopped grinning. “I want to know if we have walking time-bombs like Smith in Anytime.”

“No!” cried Shaw, Cooper and Bedflow in unison.

“But do we ensure it in our recruiting? Mark, you’re interviewing our next batch of management trainees. How are you making sure none is a future Smith?”

“Our recruitment system is built on ensuring it, Bob. We go to the top universities, so we don’t waste time evaluating these kids’ financial abilities. We focus on gauging whether they have two important characteristics: (1) a deep, burning desire for money that dominates all other motivations and (2) an absence of any sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.”

“Excellent!” said Thorton, “That’s right on the money. But how do you get the answer?”

“Both characteristics go hand-in-hand, making interviewing easier. We find out what the candidate will do to acquire wealth, which automatically covers the second area. For example, I just asked Jeremy Habit, the candidate you saw in my room, what he would do if he gets a phone call saying his grandmother is critically ill and he has to rush to the hospital or never see her alive; but as soon as he hangs up, he gets another call saying he has won $6,000 in a contest but has to collect the money in the next hour or lose it forever.”

“He collects the cash, of course,” said Bill Shaw, “It’s a no-brainer.”

“Yes! But amazingly, many candidates select the grandma. College toppers, but no sense of money. We weed them out straightaway. But I think we have an exceptional candidate in Habit. He said he’d ask if they would increase the payout to $10,000 if he made it in the next 15 minutes. We also ascertain if they will always put their own and Anytime’s interests ahead of everyone else, especially our clients. Gauging this is tricky because candidates hesitate to divulge criminal tendencies. So I give them real life incidents and ask for reactions. For example, I told Habit this true recent story about a group of construction worker friends in New Jersey who regularly pooled their money to buy lottery tickets, which they entrusted to one member of the group, Americo Lopes. One day, Lopes quietly collected $17.5 million of after-tax prize money and did not tell his friends. I asked for his reaction. ‘Way to go, Lopes!’ he said immediately. ‘And the friends?’ I asked. ‘Suckers,’ he said. I now have a good assessment of Habit’s moral fibre and I’m bloody impressed.”

“So am I, so am I,” said Thorton genially.

Bedflow continued: “I also ask them to name their hero. If the idiots say Mahatma Gandhi or Albert Einstein, they’re out. We’re looking for wealthy names here.”

“Of course!” said Thorton, “And who’s Habit’s hero?”

“Mitt Romney.”

“Bedflow, our recruiting is in good hands. Next week let’s go through our on-boarding, training and performance appraisal system and ensure that they too are geared to develop the right talent at Anytime Bank. Now go and finish interviewing Habit. It looks like you have a gem in your hands. I look forward to welcoming him into Anytime.”

Paddy Rangappa is a freelance writer based in Singapore. Read more on his blog: http://theflip-side.blogspot.com