
During three decades as the head of financial-services consulting firm Greenwich Associates, Charley Ellis had a front-row view of Goldman Sachs' rise from also-ran to king of Wall Street. He then spent a decade working on a history of the firm, published last year as The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs . So what is Ellis' explanation for Goldman's spectacular rebound it turned a $5.2 billion profit in the first half of the year from the financial crisis?
"The most obvious is people," he says. "They recruit the most extraordinarily talented people, the most gifted in...