What was the reputation of Lehman pre-financial crisis?
Monkeys, for millennial wall street folks like myself who entered the workforce post-financial crisis, what was the reputation of Lehman Brothers before the financial crisis? How did groups rank against other firms at the time? What were some of the cultural reputations?
Thanks!
This 2007 Fortune ranking of Most Admired Securities Companies might give you some color on this.
Lehman ranked #1 overall and topped all 8 reputation attributes - Yes, they got #1 for both financial soundness & long-term investment. Hilarious.
I've networked with a few bankers that were at LEH before and during the crisis and they uniformly describe the culture there as the "wild fucking west".
Could you expand a bit more on this? Was their out of the office scene very extravagant and wild?
She, the main girl that I talked to who was at Lehman, said that it was the wild west was how spontaneous the environment was. They would be discussing a deal they were working on and then suddenly decide "we should do a site visit to the firm across the country" and boom they would be on a plane.
When Barclay's acquired Lehman's NA assets, she said that trying to gel the "snooty" culture of Barclay's with the wild west culture of Lehman was a big issue.
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I still bleed Lehman green. It was a pretty awesome place.
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