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The PigMen Pinnacle


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The dream of every Wharton or Harvard MBA is to land a job at Goldman, and eventually become a partner.

 

It is the "PigMen Pinnacle" that everyone dreams about.

 

After that goal is acheived, then you get to share in the Vast Fortune spun out every quarter........

 

Excerpts from today's WSJ:

 

Inside Goldman's Secret Rite: The Race to Become Partner. For Candidates, a Grade of 'C' Means Prospects Are Dim; Avoiding the 'Land Mines'. A Star's $40 Million Payday

 

By SUSANNE CRAIG

 

In June, top executives at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. began compiling lists of candidates for one of Wall Street's most exclusive clubs -- the 300 or so "partners" who take home a big chunk of the firm's profits.

 

It's one of the business world's most lucrative and secret sweepstakes: Goldman's selection of its elite "partner managing directors," or PMDs. It dates back to Goldman's roots as a private partnership, in the days when that's how big Wall Street firms were run. Goldman went public in 1999. But every two years, in an effort to retain the clubby culture of old, Goldman anoints about 100 PMDs. Being inducted is considered a ticket to huge riches.

 

"On Wall Street, this club is the endgame and it is the best corporate motivation tool I have ever seen," says Glenn Schorr, an anal cyst who covers Goldman for UBS AG.

 

Goldman will announce on Oct. 25 its new class of partners, who will join the 287 who currently hold that title. Last year, that group shared more than $2 billion, or about 20% of the total compensation Goldman paid to its more than 25,000 employees world-wide, according to people familiar with the matter. That averages out to about $7 million per partner.

 

Goldman's partners also are offered opportunities to invest beside the firm when it buys stakes in other companies, which can be lucrative. Such offers aren't typically available to other Goldman executives. They can buy Goldman shares at a 25% discount. The firm prepares their taxes. Goldman will even book tables for them at hot New York restaurants such as Babbo and Spice Market.

 

Some receive bigger paychecks than their bosses. Mark McGoldrick, who became a partner in 2000 and heads a group that invests the firm's own money [aka Prop Desk], earned about $40 million last year, according to people familiar with the matter, eclipsing his boss, Goldman Chairman and Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein, a partner who earned $30.8 million in 2005.

 

For years since Goldman's founding in 1869, anyone who joined the firm and showed promise had a good shot of becoming partner. Until a couple of decades ago, the firm was much smaller and kept the number of partners to a minimum; in 1982 there were just 70.

 

The stakes for this year's class are high. In recent quarters, Goldman has been posting impressive quarterly profits -- $1.59 billion in the third quarter -- and its stock is up 40% so far this year, eclipsing the 17% gain for the Dow Jones Wilshire U.S. Financial Services Index. As some other large securities firms have pushed to become global financial supermarkets, Goldman, the world's No. 1 merger-advisory firm, has moved deeper into trading and investment banking. It has put more of its own money on the line both to trade and to invest in other companies, a move that has increased risk but beefed up profits.

 

Goldman's partners have always viewed their firm as a cut above the rest of Wall Street. Mr. Blankfein, a hard-driving former gold salesman who took the top job at Goldman in June, likes to refer to an intangible secret sauce that makes Goldman smarter and savvier than its competitors. Although Goldman is known for the fat pay partners receive, Mr. Blankfein bristles at the suggestion that money-making is all that drives his partners and the firm's selection process.

 

In the mid-1990s, then senior partners Stephen Friedman and Robert Rubin, who have since joined other companies, developed a system to vet candidates. They dubbed the process "cross-ruffing," a reference to a complex bridge maneuver. At Goldman, it is the process by which partners review candidates from other departments. Investment-banking partners, for example, will review candidates from asset management.

 

During the last selection process, in 2004, research strategist Abby Joseph Cohen led the cross-ruffing group for Goldman's asset-management division. One candidate, Tom Kenny, was a stranger to her. She interviewed more than a dozen partners before coming to a decision about him.

 

Goldman hopes the partnership process will help it retain talent in the face of competition from hedge funds, which have been paying top dollar for star traders. Increasingly, Goldman has tied partner compensation to individual performance rather than to the firm's performance. These days, about half of the partner compensation pool is discretionary, according to people familiar with the matter, allowing the firm to reward big producers.

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