变得家喻户晓对高盛（Goldman Sachs）来说一直都不是什么好事。不久前，在华尔街和美国顶级企业圈之外，几乎还没有什么人非常关注高盛，人们注意到的似乎只是这么多以前在高盛效力过的员工都进入了美国联邦政府以及其他管理机构的上层。接下来爆发了全球金融危机。几乎在一夜之间，高盛成了人们眼中所有错误的万恶之源。

    史蒂文•曼迪斯于1992-2004年在高盛任职，目前是哥伦比亚大学商学院（Columbia Business School）兼职教授和社会学系博士研究生。鉴于公众对自己前雇主的关注程度，曼迪斯精明地把自己博士论文中的部分内容编纂成册，出了一本书，名叫《高盛怎么了》【What Happened to Goldman Sachs，哈佛评论杂志社（Harvard Business Review Press），381页）。这种做法非常符合高盛的作风——这家公司教给人们的就是怎样在机会出现的时候抓住它。2012年3月14日，格雷格•史密斯曾经在《纽约时报》（the New York Times）社论版对页发表了一篇具有煽风点火作用的文章，他在其中公开辞去了高盛常务董事一职，这也是出于同样的思路。此举让史密斯出了名，还为他赢得了一份价值不菲的图书出版合同。

    不过，和史密斯不同，曼迪斯的写作动机是悲伤，而非愤怒；而且曼迪斯想对自己的前雇主进行解析，而不是加以利用。显然，尽管已经离开高盛近10年之久，他仍然非常尊敬和喜爱前者；同时，对于公众对高盛的看法，曼迪斯似乎视而不见。举例来说，曼迪斯在引言中谨慎地说：“2006年它是如此地广受赞誉，到了2009年它却是如此地广受指责，很难相信在这期间这家公司的文化会发生这样的巨变。”

    然而，公众对高盛的看法发生变化当然和高盛文化的改变无关。这种变化来源于公众开始认为高盛是一家“过大因而不能倒闭”的公司，是一家得到了政府援助的公司，在数百万美国普通大众仍处于困境时，高盛的利润却迅速达到了历史最高点，而且开始发放巨额奖金——就算按华尔街的标准来看也是天价。

    高盛从一家主要靠服务客户盈利的小型合伙企业变成一家主要靠交易盈利的全球性大型上市公司，曼迪斯在书中冷静分析了这家公司在这个过程中所发生的变迁。为客户提供服务时，长期性最重要。而开展自营交易时，长期规划就变成了“午餐点什么？”

    高盛出现的情况相当简单：动力变了。从1869年成立到1986年，高盛一直是一家普通的合伙企业。也就是说，每位合伙人都对高盛的全部债务负责。因此，这家公司对自己承担的风险非常、非常小心。公司倒闭会给所有合伙人带来灭顶之灾。在这种情况下，他们（其中几乎没有女性）都希望确保公司不会倒闭。

    1986年，高盛改组为有限责任公司——这是一次重大调整。合伙人在公司的资金依然面临风险，但除此之外，他们的其他财产都很安全。

    Becoming a household name has not been a good thing for Goldman Sachs (GS). Not long ago, few people outside Wall Street and the top tier of corporate America paid much attention to Goldman, other than to note how many former Goldmanites seemed to be concentrated in the upper echelons of the federal government and other seats of power. Then came the worldwide financial meltdown, and almost overnight, Goldman came to be invoked as a symbol of everything that had gone wrong.

    Steven Mandis, who worked at Goldman from 1992 to 2004 and is now an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and a doctoral candidate in the sociology department. With public interest aroused in his former employer, Mandis has astutely adapted parts of his Ph.D. thesis into a book called What Happened to Goldman Sachs (Harvard Business Review Press, 381 pages). That's a very Goldman move: The place teaches you how to seize opportunities when they present themselves. It's the same kind of thinking that led Greg Smith to publicly resign from his position as a Goldman executive director on March 14, 2012, via an incendiary op-ed column in the New York Times (NYT). It made him a celebrity and netted him a substantial book contract.

    Unlike Smith, however, Mandis is writing out of sorrow rather than anger, and trying to explain rather than exploit his former employer. He clearly has a lot of respect and affection for Goldman despite having been gone almost a decade, and seems to have a blind spot about how the general public perceives the firm. In his introduction, for example, Mandis muses, "It strains credulity to think that the firm's culture could have changed so dramatically between 2006, when the firm was so generally admired, and 2009, when it became so widely vilified."

    But of course, that change in the public perception of Goldman has nothing to do with changes in Goldman's culture. The change came as the public began to see Goldman as a too-big-to-fail firm, helped by government bailouts, that quickly began posting record profits and paying bonuses that were huge even by Wall Street standards while millions of Main Street Americans were still suffering.

    Mandis's book is a sober analysis of the changes that took place at Goldman as the firm transformed itself from a smallish partnership whose profits came primarily from serving clients into a worldwide colossus with public stock whose major profits come from trading. When you serve clients, the long term matters. In proprietary trading, long-term planning is, "What should we order for lunch?"

    What happened to Goldman is rather simple: Incentives changed. From its founding in 1869 through 1986, the firm was a general partnership. This meant that every partner was responsible for all of Goldman's debts. As a result, the firm was very, very careful about the risks it took. When any partner can be personally wiped out if the firm fails, he (there were few shes) wants to make sure that it doesn't fail.

    In 1986, Goldman became a limited liability company -- a significant change. Partners' capital in the firm was still at risk, but anything they owned outside of the partnership was safe.