John Waldron, president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs, visited BYU Marriott not only to receive but also to give. Before accepting the school’s 2023 International Executive of the Year Award, Waldron shared counsel with students in a special Q&A session moderated by BYU Marriott dean Brigitte Madrian. More than 350 students packed into the Tanner Building’s first-floor lecture hall to hear Waldron’s experiences and observations; topics ranged from mistakes to mentors, family to finance. After the session, Waldron greeted students individually while Goldman Sachs representatives mingled with the crowd. The following are abridged highlights from Waldron’s remarks on October 20, 2023.
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Madrian:
Will you tell us a little bit about your personal journey?
Waldron:
My journey began in Cleveland, Ohio. I lived there until I was 15, when my father took a job in Philadelphia and moved us from the Midwest to the East Coast. It seems fairly simplistic, but it actually changed the trajectory of my education and my career.
I enrolled at Middlebury College. I was an English major and an economics minor, but I was more of an English kid than a finance kid.
I thought I was going be a writer, but I went to the University of Chicago for a summer business program, which changed my perspective quite a bit. I learned a lot about finance and entry-level opportunities in financial services. Consequently, I went back to school my senior year and dedicated my job search to financial services. I thought it would be an interesting place to learn finance and also be a good baseline for whatever I would do in my career. I had absolutely no intention of staying beyond the first few years. But now—30-some years into it—I have every intention of staying in this arena, which I love.
Madrian:
We often have a view of what we’re going to do with our lives, and I love the fact that you started out in English and decided to explore financial services.
Waldron:
It takes an enormous amount of hard work, dedication, and commitment to be successful. So if you don’t love your job and really wake up motivated every morning, then it’s not easy to be successful. The most important thing is to have a passion.
Madrian:
What did you think your career was going to look like when you graduated from college, and how does that compare to what actually happened?
Waldron:
I thought I would spend two years on Wall Street, learn a variety of fundamental skills, then work for an industrial company or for a nonfinancial services company, and then pursue an executive track. It turned out that I fell in love with the work—but more importantly—with the people I got to work with. I was constantly energized by the people who I was interacting with.
There’s a learning curve—and it actually got steeper. It never really felt like it plateaued, and it still doesn’t feel like it’s plateaued. What’s kept me going is the intellectual curiosity and the strength of the people around me. I still learn today from a lot of young people who have really good ideas.
Madrian:
Was your first job out of college at Goldman, or did you start somewhere else?
Waldron:
I started working for a firm called Bear Stearns. There are interesting opportunities when you can go work for firms that are younger or less established, where you might actually get more running room early in your career, which is what happened to me. I learned a lot because I was thrown out there a little bit more ambitiously than I might have been at a firm like Goldman Sachs. I made more mistakes early in my career, but I learned from those mistakes. I had to interact with senior people more quickly. It taught me a lot about the interaction with more established professionals and how those interactions are meant to go.
Madrian:
You said that you made a lot of mistakes and that you learned from them. Do you have an example of a mistake that was an important learning opportunity for you?
Waldron:
Something I struggled with early in my career was an undue amount of optimism—which is another way of saying not enough skepticism or cynicism—and not questioning whether the path we were going down was really the right path. You can be too quick to jump on the trendy piece of advice or the trendy theme in the market. There’s a lot of momentum on Wall Street. It’s hard to go against the tide.
I learned to stop and to question—to make sure the advice resonated.
I think I have pretty good instincts, but sometimes I ignored those instincts because the wave was going a certain direction, and I was a little too optimistic about the wave. As I’ve gotten more seasoned, spent more time, looked at more transactions, and worked in more situations with clients, I’ve become much more willing to go against the tide, challenge the conventional wisdom, and give advice that isn’t popular. I think that has served me well, although it wasn’t a strength early in my career.
Madrian:
Was there a person in your professional journey who saw you as someone who would be able to handle a large organization?
Waldron:
There were many people on the way who mentored me—some who I really understood at the time were mentoring me, and some who were doing it from a distance. These people saw raw material and realized that they could put some of their imprint on that raw material to help me become more of a seasoned executive.
One of the complicated equations about being in any business is you go from being an individual contributor to being somebody who can scale their impact. For a long time I was an individual contributor; I was working on deals, advising companies, raising capital, and working on transactions. Then there was a period of my career when I was asked to take ownership of more than just things that were in my purview. It’s a little bit like being a new parent. You realize, Wow, I’m actually responsible for this young child. And if I don’t do the right things, this young child isn’t going to survive, much less thrive.
I remember quite distinctly waking up at one point and thinking, I have to make those people better in order for us to be more successful. That was an eye-opener for me. And I think I got a lot of mentoring along the way as far as how to do that—how to motivate people, how to think about yourself in terms of a coach. I still think a lot about that transition.
Madrian:
Was there a moment when a switch flipped and you could see yourself not just as an individual contributor but as a leader?
Waldron:
When I moved from New York to London in the early part of 2007, there was a lot of money coming from all parts of the globe into London. I remember distinctly the feeling of excess that was all around me. And then shortly thereafter, the financial crisis happened.
That was the first time I was in a job where I had a very big set of responsibilities, and it was clear we were going into a crisis. I awakened to the fact that that I needed to figure out how to navigate all the challenges around me—the business, the people, the clients, the risk that we had on our balance sheet, and so forth. For me, that was an eye-opening experience. Had I not been through that experience, I wouldn’t be in this job today. I learned a lot of lessons in that period of time.
Madrian:
You’re married and you’ve got six kids. As a woman I’m often asked about balancing family and career, and I think it’s unfair to only ask women about that, so I’m going to ask you. You’ve got an incredibly demanding job—very public, a lot of pressure—and you’ve got a large family. How do you balance your family and your career?
Waldron:
It starts by having a spouse who is super supportive of my career and what we’re trying to achieve together: a fairly ambitious career and a really close, tight, family-oriented life together. She’s a great partner. When you get married, the most important thing is to find someone who will really be your partner through the ups and downs and will understand you and really stand by you and have you stand by them. My wife is magnificent in every respect that way. I couldn’t do this without somebody like that as a partner.
The second thing I would say is discipline. I’m pretty disciplined about my time. I’m organized and focused on what’s business and what’s personal. I color-code my calendar, just as an example, which is something that I worked on a long time ago when I had my first couple of kids. I was much less senior at my job, and I had a lot less flexibility in terms of how I could dictate my time. I put things in my calendar that were immovable—school plays or sporting events—and I’ve maintained that to this day.
This weekend I have quite an active schedule. I will be driving around to various sporting events—captive time with my children in which I try to get them to talk to me. And I’ll be on the sidelines doing my best not to be that overbearing parent.
I try to put my devices away when I’m with my children. That’s something I’ve gotten better at. My kids have actually helped me get better. They have often said, “You’re here, but you’re not really here.”
With six kids, the hardest thing is to have an individual relationship with each child. I started trying to build more individualized time, including taking each one away for a trip, taking them to school individually, and really taking time to talk with them. Putting them to bed individually, reading a story, asking them questions.
Madrian:
I think that is wonderful advice and counsel for everyone in this room. I’m going to ask you one last question, and then we’ll open it up to the students. What do you know today that you wish you had known when you were a college student?
Waldron:
I did not stop to smell the roses along the way as much as I should have. You go through these various phases of life. They’re each fascinating: young career, single, friends, married life, early-married life with no kids, then married life with young kids, and married life with older kids. And then you wake up and you’re 50. You’re wondering, How did that happen so quickly?
Every one of those moments is quite special and interesting. They are learning experiences. Don’t wish them away. Don’t be in a hurry. I think I was a little in a hurry. I’ve gotten better at that. I would encourage you to enjoy the ride. Life is a great journey. It’s not always perfect. There are going to be challenges. Absorb them and live in the moment as much as possible.
Rhett Anderson, Finance:
How did you intentionally develop the skills and attributes that you need to serve in the role you’re in today?
Waldron:
As I was young in my career, I would pretty intentionally push the people who I worked for or the people who worked around me for feedback. I was an athlete as a kid, and I was always coached to work on my weaknesses as I was trying to become a better athlete. I ultimately wasn’t as good an athlete, so I had to quit and become an executive. But getting feedback was a lesson I learned early in athletics and in school. What are my weaknesses? What do I have to do to work on them?
The other area is that I was very observant. I still am very observant of people more senior than I am. How do they go about their business and their daily activities? What do they do, and what do I want to emulate? It doesn’t mean I want to be exactly like them, because you have to play to your own characteristics, capabilities, and strengths. But everybody has a way of going about things, and I would try to pull different components of what I saw—just little nuggets I could pull away as a piece of my own. It could have been a client or somebody I worked for. It could have been someone I met in my personal life or somebody who I was watching parent their own kids. Those are two things that I’ve learned over time.
Stan Oakes, Finance
You mentioned that as your position has become more elevated, motivating people around you has become increasingly important. What things can we do now to be an energizer to motivate the people around us?
Waldron:
Have a willingness to stand up and share your voice when it’s uncomfortable. That would include when you’re in small-group settings—taking a position, explaining your position, and articulating why you believe in it strongly.
I think your generation is much better at this than my generation was. You are not as afraid, I observe, to step out. Practice doing that as much as you can. Not winging it, not just throwing stuff out there randomly, but actual things that you’ve really thought about—personal issues, societal issues, business issues. Practice the skill of articulating opposition—taking a stance, articulating it to the people around you, and engaging in debate respectfully.
I’m still practicing that skill of sitting around a table with very strong-willed people and trying to convince them that the direction I would like to go is the right direction. It’s a skill that you can develop in your career that will serve you incredibly well.
Also, be willing to change your mind. Don’t be dogmatic, where you believe so strongly in everything that you think is right that you’re not willing to listen to others’ competing points of view. One of the most powerful things you can do as a leader is to change your mind after considering others’ input and perspectives. It doesn’t mean you always change your mind. But if you can articulate a position and then be moved off your position because somebody has an argument that actually changed your opinion, that’s the mark of a strong leader.
Easton Christiansen, Pre-Business
What habits do you deem to be the most important for us to start developing?
Waldron:
Most people are better talkers than listeners. I would work hard to develop the ability to listen and to hear competing viewpoints and assimilate those competing viewpoints to form your own judgment. Unfortunately, you’re growing up in an era with more information overload than I had when I was your age, so it’s going to be even harder to assimilate all that information.
Coming up with a system for time management is incredibly important. The most effective executives I see are really good at managing their time. They don’t waste a lot of time on things that are not important.
The third thing would be relational skills: having the ability to relate to other people, to disagree respectfully, to learn from other people’s perspectives. If you can develop those skills, you’re going to be really well off because they’re in short supply. The more people there are who can bridge divides, the better we’ll be.
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About the Recipient
Established by BYU Marriott 40 years ago, the International Executive of the Year (IEY) Award honors outstanding executives who have demonstrated exceptional leadership and high moral and ethical standards. It is the most prestigious award given by BYU Marriott. The 2023 IEY Award was presented to John Waldron by BYU president C. Shane Reese and BYU Marriott dean Brigitte Madrian.
Waldron joined Goldman Sachs in 2000 and currently serves as the company’s president and chief operating officer. He is a member of the Goldman Sachs Management Committee, cochair of its Firmwide Enterprise Risk Committee, and chair of its Firmwide Reputational Risk Committee. In addition to his roles at Goldman Sachs, Waldron sits on the executive committee of the Institute of International Finance (IIF) and on the international advisory council of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). He is also a member of the US-China Business Council, the international advisory panel of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and the Council on Foreign Relations.
