{"text":[[{"start":4.25,"text":"At Goldman Sachs, two things have nearly doubled in about a year — investment banking advisory fees and the size of the firm’s upper echelon management committee. "}],[{"start":14.3,"text":"Two promotions this week took the number of members on Goldman’s management committee — or MC, to use its internal abbreviation — to a whopping 47. This is up from 24 members at the start of 2025, and means that more than one in every 10 Goldman partners now sits on its top management team. One Goldmanite told me the MC is now “incredibly bloated”."}],[{"start":39.2,"text":"Although the nomenclature varies, such a large senior management team makes Goldman an outlier on Wall Street. JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley both have 13 members on their operating committees. European banks tend to be just as lean. UBS has 13 members on its group executive board while Barclays has 16 people on its executive committee."}],[{"start":61.400000000000006,"text":"So is this an addition of expertise that will hone the strategic thinking of Goldman’s top people or an example of administrative bloat? In the world of too big to fail, when is a committee too big to matter?"}],[{"start":73.55000000000001,"text":"First, let’s look at what these committees are actually for. When firms like Goldman were private partnerships, the top committees collectively ran the firm. Their influence has waned as they became public companies. "}],[{"start":85.55000000000001,"text":"Ranjay Gulati, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, argues if a company “has 47 people or whatever number you have in a large committee, it’s much more of an information session than a decision session”."}],[{"start":98.45000000000002,"text":"Nowadays, Goldman’s MC meets every Monday morning for about two hours. Executives will give updates on their business, chat about interesting clients they’ve met with and discuss trends they’re following. There are also away days to talk about plans for the years ahead. "}],[{"start":114.55000000000001,"text":"Jamie Dimon, speaking last month at Norges Bank Investment Management’s conference, said that his weekly meeting with his top team at JPMorgan was an important part of giving them exposure to other parts of the business. "}],[{"start":127.9,"text":"Dimon said: “Even though it’s not in their business, they’re going to hear us talking about consumer, payment systems, wealth management products, mistakes, errors, litigation problems, regulation problems, tech problems, customer complaints.” "}],[{"start":142.9,"text":"But just as important, membership confers seniority. It signals that you are an important person at the company, that your business and your role matter. That’s what promotions symbolise, as well as an indication of what areas the bank sees as strategic priorities."}],[{"start":159.20000000000002,"text":"Goldman hasn’t always been so giving in its approach — ex-chief executive Lloyd Blankfein recalls in his memoir Streetwise being only granted “observer status” in 1994 despite a big promotion, though the committee did grow to 35 people in 2014 when Blankfein was running Goldman. "}],[{"start":178.35000000000002,"text":"So in part, it’s a talent management question. You can keep people for only so long by telling them they represent the future of the company before those words need to be backed up by actions — like elevation to the management committee. "}],[{"start":191.3,"text":"Goldman seems to be emphasising excess over restraint. For a chief executive like David Solomon who has struggled in the past to hold the full backing of his workforce, that should help foster more support. In a statement, Goldman said its MC “reflects the significant growth of our business in the past decade and our deep bench of leaders”. "}],[{"start":212.25,"text":"These things ebb and flow. Eventually most executives do hit an internal ceiling and either make peace with their place in the corporate hierarchy or look for a move elsewhere. "}],[{"start":222.55,"text":"Dimon has run a leaner top team over his 20 years leading JPMorgan but its size has expanded and contracted, at times being as tightly knit as 10 people and as large as 18 in 2020 and 2021."}],[{"start":236.70000000000002,"text":"At that time, Dimon’s top team grew with the promotion of several executives like Marc Badrichani and Takis Georgakopoulos. A few years later, they missed out on top promotions and left the bank. Something similar could happen at Goldman in the years ahead. "}],[{"start":252.75000000000003,"text":"Making the top committee can be a giant career step on the road to bigger things. But ultimately, a place on a management committee is no guarantee of being in a chief executive’s inner circle. "}],[{"start":263.55,"text":"“The management committees have become the gathering of basically the heads of businesses,” said Georges Ugeux, a former management committee member at investment bank Kidder, Peabody who now teaches at Columbia Law School. “But if there is an emergency, it’s not the management committee that is going to be called in. It’s something much smaller.”"}],[{"start":289.75,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1778311837_2323.mp3"}