Goldman Sachs, a chief investment bank rival to JPMorgan Chase, takes a beating in the first-person op-ed piece, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,’’ by equity derivatives banker Greg Smith, published by The New York Times in March 2012.
“I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it. To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money,’’ writes Smith, a 12-year employee with clients having a “total asset base of more than a trillion dollars.’’
If this collection is any indication, venality is rampant: in corporate America (“Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up by Wal-Mart After Top Level Struggle’); at giant pharmaceuticals, hospitals, pharmacy chains and doctors’ offices (“Anemia Drugs Made Billions, but at What Cost’’ “Bad to the Bone: A Medical Horror Story,’’ “Prescription for Addiction’’), and at technology’s leading companies (“In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad’’).
Is there anything upbeat in this book about fraud, greed and malfeasance? Yes.
In “Glass Works: How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future,’’ writer Bryan Gardiner reminds us that Old School values still count:
“Even though it’s a big company -- 29,000 employees and revenue of $7.9 billion in 2011 -- Corning still thinks and acts like a small one.’’ Its annual attrition rate is 1 percent and it has, Gardiner writes, a “vast institutional memory.
“We’re all lifers here,’’ says its CEO Wendell Weeks, who sees all Corning hands as equally important in the company’s fate.
But even Corning does not go unscathed.
In 2007, Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, asks Corning to create vast amounts of a 1.3mm, chemically strengthened glass for his company’s groundbreaking device, the iPhone.
Gardiner reports that sheets of Corning’s newly dubbed Gorilla Glass are shipped to finishing facilities in China, “where they get their molten potassium baths and are cut into touchable rectangles.’’