Book Review: Steven G. Mandis: What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider’s Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences
Looking for a good read now that the semester is winding down?
Steven G. Mandis: What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider’s Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013. 400 pp. $28.00, hardcover.
Alexandra Michel of University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education reviewed Steven G. Mandis’s “What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider’s Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences” in the December issue of Administrative Science Quarterly.
From the review:
If you were to read the mostly positive Amazon reviews of What Happened
to Goldman Sachs, you would also find complaints that the book is “dry and depersonalized” and, perhaps less offensive to readers of an academic journal, “a business school case study” filled with “obtuse information” (namely data tables) instead of a “lurid and titillating insider’s look” into Wall Street excess. These reviews miss the point. Far from being depersonalized, the book offers the personal in a way that is societally important. But you have to know how to look. The personal does not come in the form of a lurid and titillating narrative about Wall Street actors. It comes as the opportunity to witness one such actor, namely Mandis, in action, which is societally important because it helps explain how Goldman transforms people and what accounts for its success.
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