Moving on to the humanist segment of the World’s population, Lloyd Blankfein told a banker’s conference in New York: “I often hear references to higher compensation at Goldman,” …. “What people fail to mention is that net income generated per head is a multiple of our peer average. The people of Goldman Sachs are among the most productive in the world.”

There may be some mileage in claiming your employees are the best of the best when it comes to PR in ‘normal times’. And it might ring true for many Goldman shareholders, customers, potential customers and other admirers. But what Lloyd seems to have missed here is that the people he is trying to convince are not likely to be potential Goldman admirers.

Telling the angry, the redundant, the broke, the uneducated or the envious (or anyone with any negative sentiment towards your firm) that your guys deserve more because they are better than everyone else doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to us.

And even if Lloyd being the smartest of the Goldman smarts has a unique insight on this, considering all the effort, will it really make any difference? People will be angry, bonuses will get paid, people will be more angry and then  something else will come along to be angry about. Why stoke the fire when it is under you?

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