Goldman Sachs interns wanting to know how to impress chief executive Lloyd Blankfein
have been told how to do so by the man himself: bring in cookies.
"I eat so much junk food... I’m the chocolate chip cookie king of the world," Blankfein said in a light-hearted address to the bank's 2017 class of summer interns, a video of which has been posted by the bank online.
He added that interns should always remember to bring "chocolate chip cookies to work".
Goldman Sachs runs a 10-week internship programme each summer and the bank puts on a number of panels and events at which its top executives share career tips with the interns.
Blankfein talked about his early days at the bank, which he joined 35 years ago, when the trading floor was a "cacophony of noise" where colleagues smoked and "screamed at each other".
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He said that to be successful in today's banking industry it was important to be "interesting" and "well rounded" and urged interns to cultivate their interests outside of work.
“If you are going to be successful I think you owe it to yourself to be a well rounded person,” he said. “To be successful in this, or anything else, you have to know the content of your business but you also have to be the kind of person that people want to talk to and be friends with and be interesting.”
But on his own interests outside of work, Blankfein admitted: "My favourite day is like when it’s rainy and I can just lie on a couch."
At the same address a year ago, Blankfein told the 2016 class of interns to "chill out" — though he acknowledged the competitive nature of the industry and admitted he would have struggled to follow that advice himself when starting out.
READ After Blankfein, Sherwood offers tips to Goldman's juniors
