Owning Our Future

FOUROVERLOADThe Expanding House of Claims

Heading from New York back to Boston on the Acela train, I found myself turning over in my mind something Michael had said. It was about investment banking firms’ changing their ownership structures from partnerships to publicly traded companies. I’d been so engrossed in our conversation about speed, I’d glossed over that point. But I realized how critical it might be. Why hadn’t I heard others talking about this?

Back home, I dug around on the Web and found an academic paper exploring the changes in culture that occurred when Salomon Brothers went public in 1981, Lehman Brothers in 1984, and Goldman Sachs in 1999. Authors Richard Freedman and Jill Vohr of the Stern School of Business at New York University ...