Don burn bridges: is the advice swiftly dished out to anyone considering handing in a resignation letter to their boss. After all, given the uncertainty of the times in which we live, who can afford a ticked off boss calling any and all prospective employers to douse out any chances of resurrecting a career after snubbing a job?
Apparently no one was around to deliver this simple advice to former executive director of Goldman Sachs, Greg Smith. Either that or Smith just wasn listening.
In fact by the time he decided to call it quits at the goliath of Wall Street, the former head of the firms US equity business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa was so sick of the senior management, culture and business as usual at Goldman Sachs, that Greg Smith not only gave a piece of his mind to his bosses in a resignation letter; he also dispatched a copy of the same letter to the New York Times.
A tsunami of responses flooded the print and electronic media as soon as the op-ed entitled, "Why I am leaving Goldman Sachs" appeared in the NYT on last Wednesday, March 14. "Did Greg Smith Commit Career Suicide?" questioned Forbes magazine. Its staff writer Susan Adams responded with a rhetorical yes, reminding "do not bad mouth your former employer".
Chief correspondent for the US-based National Journal, Michael Hirsh hailed Smiths write up as "the resignation letter heard round the world". Writing for the Atlantic, Hirsh chimed in with the former Goldman employees assertion that the environment on Wall Street is "toxic" and "destructive". But even he appeared doubtful over the former Goldman employees career prospects; "Greg Smith now joins a very small group - an absurdly small group - of truth tellers".
But even though no investment bank will touch his resume with a ten foot pole, not all is awry for the freshly former investment banker. Bloomberg reported that the Goldman critic is being hounded by publishing agents to write a "tell-all" book that could earn Smith much more than the 150 dollars paid by the NYT for op-eds.
Financial reform activists are also vying for his attention. Dennis Kelleher, President of Better Markets Inc; a financial reform lobbying firm, is among many who are publicly offering jobs to Greg Smith to help them take the fight to Big Business.
After all the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act in the United States has played out in the form of stretched out debates over more curbs for the financial industry; debates Smith can now join for a not-so-small fee. And thats just the tip of the iceberg.
Audiences in the EU are just as likely to line up to hear a lecture or two by a Wall Street renegade. Even the flustered policy makers in Washington DC would do well to enlist the help of any influential Wall Street insider with a belatedly developed conscience.
So the future seems bright for any more executive directors at the helm of affairs at a leading global financial institution, who may be thinking of crying foul and jumping ship.
But if your career has played out more like Tim Taylor on Tool Time than Gordon Gecko in the 1980s classic, Wall Street and you still want to give your soon-to-be-former boss a piece of your mind; do yourself a favour and hold that thought.