Word: blankfein
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Blankfein's career took off. He seemed to have a sixth sense about when to push traders to take more risk and when to take their collective feet off the accelerator. "It's not about hanging on to a predisposition," Blankfein told FORTUNE in March 2008. "The best traders are not right more than they are wrong. They are quick adjusters. They are better at getting right when they are wrong." Blankfein too was becoming a quick adjuster...
...wake of Winkelman's departure from the firm after he'd been passed over for the top job at Goldman in favor of Jon Corzine (now governor of New Jersey), Blankfein was selected to run J. Aron. His appetite for risk quickly surfaced. In 1995 he chided his fellow partners for being too risk-averse and promptly left a conference room where they were meeting to place a multimillion-dollar bet with the firm's money that the dollar would rise against the yen. Blankfein's bet - one of his favorites - paid off, and he impressed his partners...
...December 2003 he was named Goldman's chief operating officer and co-president after the departure of John Thain - Blankfein's rival to lead the firm - who left to become CEO of the New York Stock Exchange. By then, Blankfein had impressed Goldman's board of directors and especially Paulson, then the CEO, with his tenacity, ambition and hands-on management style. "Hank became increasingly concerned about whether [John] Thornton or Thain" - the co-presidents of Goldman before Blankfein - "would assume responsibility for the business units and show they could run things," says a former Goldman partner. "Lloyd showed...
Defending Goldman's Crown When, in July 2006, president Bush tapped Paulson to be Secretary of the Treasury - in the great Goldman tradition - Blankfein's journey from a Brooklyn housing complex to the pinnacle of American capitalism was complete. By then, all of Blankfein's quirky bad habits had been eliminated too. Blankfein has since become a snappier dresser, has lost weight and has given up smoking and gambling. He shaved his once unsightly beard. "I wasn't going to make myself taller," he once quipped when asked about his transformation. He in effect reduced the risks in his personal...
Goldman's CEO and other top execs are set for another huge payday this year, although some of his former partners wonder about the backlash against him and the firm as a result. Blankfein is worried too. How is he to juggle the firm's great success - and the attendant increasing bonus expectations of the high achievers working at the firm - with the inevitable public outcry that will result from paying out multiple millions of dollars in bonuses at a time when people all over the country are still reeling from a financial calamity largely of Wall Street's making...