Transcript
Introduction
Among the many letters of sympathy received by the family after Henry's death, was one from Sidney Weinberg, who had been elevated to the position of partner in Goldman Sachs in 1927 and assumed the role of senior partner five years later. Weinberg had started his career with the firm as a janitor's assistant. An eighth-grade dropout whose chores included cleaning the office and brushing off the partner's boots. For a long time, he was known around the office simply as boy. But like Henry whom he greatly admired and viewed as one of the geniuses behind the success of Goldman Sachs, Sidney was an excellent listener and an adaptive student. In 1919 after he left the Coast Guard, in which he served during World War I, he approached Henry seeking a job. Henry advised him to return to Goldman Sachs. That was where the opportunity lay, he said.
Demonstrating once again, a canny talent for spotting human potential, Henry offered to act as Weinberg's mentor and to introduce him to valuable contacts in the business world. At Goldman, Weinberg became a salesman of commercial paper for $28 a week plus 1.8% in commissions. Henry advised him to ask for a bigger piece of the pie as his sales escalated and he advanced to earning 33% commission at a time when the stock market was booming. And in the 1930s, Henry recommended and endorsed him for seats on many of the corporate boards on which he would serve for almost 40 years. Weinberg joined Walter Sachs as a co-chairman of the firm, became a trusted advisor to presidents and corporate chairmen, and was credited with steering Goldman Sachs into a revitalized era of prosperity and stature.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is When Money Was In Fashion: Henry Goldman, Goldman Sachs, and the Founding of Wall Street, and it was written by Henry's granddaughter, June Breton Fisher. So I wanted to start with that excerpt that comes at the end of the book, Henry had just died, to prove a point that he was just doing an act of kindness. He was helping Sidney Weinberg in the 1920s. He had already been forced out of the Goldman Sachs partnership. So he didn't have any financial benefit to the wonderful career that Weinberg winds up going and having at Goldman Sachs over the next 40 years. There's actually two additional resources I used to prepare for the podcast in addition to reading this book. And one of them is this essay, and I'll link down below in show notes both of these. But one of them is an essay that Malcolm Gladwell wrote in 2008, it's called The Uses of Adversity and is about Sidney Weinberg's story. Henry Goldman makes an appearance in that essay as well. I thought it was worth the time I invested in reading it. And the second was an episode of a podcast, its business breakdowns.