A recent Goldman Sachs reorg demonstrates an exception to my claim that “leaders love to take credit for corporate success, bolstering the impression that CEO's determine corporate action.” There’s no mention in the coverage of the CEO.
According to the WSJ, Goldman is combining three key groups in a single new one. The paper says it “is a bet by the firm.” The only reference to leadership is several paragraphs down in the comment that “[t]he bank’s top brass believes a handful of private-credit firms and similar institutions will soon dominate the debt landscape” as motivating the change, and a note in the penultimate paragraph that “Goldman’s top executives have been weighing changes to the [management] committee [a selective group of the firm’s most senior executives that helps set its strategy] for more than a year.”
Goldman does have a CEO, David Solomon, and C-suite of seven other officers (goldmansachs.com #1, accessed 1/13/2025). It’s striking that none of them are named. The management committee has 24 members (goldmansachs.com #2). It comprises the heads or co-heads of the firm’s principal business units and has responsibility for policy, strategy and management of all of Goldman Sachs’ businesses (goldmansachs.com #3).
This suggests that collective decision making is explicit in the financial sector, where other banks and financial companies have similar governance frameworks. Morgan Stanley has a 15-person operating committee (morganstanleycom) and UBS has a 15-member group executive board (ubs.com). JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and HSBC don’t seem to have that kind of governance entity. Consulting/audit businesses, perhaps because of their partner structure, often have executive management committees, e.g. Deloitte, KPMG, EY, and PwC. At McKinsey, unusually, the 750 senior partners choose their CEO every three years (MSN).
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