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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the H Idea cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

The subject of today's podcast is Goldman Sachs. Once it had a sterling reputation, but now it's sometimes referred to as a

vampire squid. Oh dear. To figure out what has changed, HBO editor Justin Fox recently

caught up with expert Stephen G. Mandis in New York.

Stephen worked for Goldman for 12 years before leaving to co-found a company that became a

client of the firms. He then left industry completely to get his PhD in sociology from

Columbia and he has now written a book that sprang out of his doctoral thesis.

The book is called What Happened to Goldman Sachs, an insider story of organizational drift

and its unintended consequences. What follows are excerpts of their conversation.

Enjoy.

So Goldman Sachs, when you got there for many decades before, it was an organization and continues to be probably more than other Wall Street firms,

an organization with a very strong identity.

You even describe it at some points as a family.

And I think from someone from the outside that seems a little shocking to say

of a Wall Street from

how was it a family? In the book I mentioned how when I first started we got

handed a little phone book and every single person that were to Goldman Sachs was their

name, address, home phone number, work number.

...