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Goals of the Organization
Setting clear goals is a primary step that an organization needs to take to succeed. This is important as it ensures that the organization has a clear vision on what it wants to achieve at different stages of growth.
It also helps in defining the yardsticks, usually quantifiable measures that we can use to objectively monitor the progress made by the organization and help in determining if its policies and structures are working as intended.
Finally identifying your goals effectively helps in motivating the employees and improves communication processes both internal and outside public relations.
Let us now look at the goals which Goldman Sachs has set for itself, identified from its vision & mission statements, business principles and its various public reports. * To provide superior returns to its shareholders.
Goldman Sachs believes that profitability is critical to achieving superior returns, building their capital, and attracting and keeping the best people.
This is a very quantifiable goal and its measured every quarter and is a primary indicator of the health of the firm. It thus relates to measurability of the SMART model1. * Strive to anticipate the rapidly changing needs of its clients and to develop new services to meet those needs.
Goldman Sachs is primarily in the service industry which is highly competitive. Thus to ensure that it stays ahead of the competition, it is imperative for Goldman Sachs to continuously evaluate the requirements of its clients and ensure that they are being met.It thus focuses on specificity as mentioned in the SMART criteria. * To identify and recruit the very best person for every job and to offer them the opportunity to develop their career faster than anywhere else.
Goldman Sachs is a people driven firm and consider them as their biggest asset as it is a service related firm and the impeccable profile and skills are what they offer to the clients to convince them to entrust their wealth with Goldman Sachs. It relates to Assignable in the SMART model. * To be good corporate citizens and make a difference to the society
Goldman Sachs partners various organizations involved with uplifting the society and caring for the environment. It does so by providing both human resources through its programs like Community team works & 10000 small businesses initiative and monetary help through it Goldman Sachs gives and matching gifts programs apart from various sponsorships and scholarships.

Technology at Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs considers technology to be one of the biggest disrupters in the coming times and has hence invested considerably in sprucing it up. It has divided it into two components: * Technology for Financial systems: The main focus is primarily on two things here: * Increasing speeds: To counter the growing tribe of boutique high frequency trading firms, Goldman Sachs has developed its own modeling language Slang and a corresponding database called Securities database which gives it an edge of multi milliseconds over its rivals for similar models. * Automating the entire trade flows and other processes: This ensures that there is lesser scope for error and is able to handle larger volumes of trading. It is built in a modular manner thereby ensuring that different systems having different functionalities are separate from each other and thus failure of one node may not necessarily affect the others. * Technology for non-financial systems: These include technologies which have been developed for departments like HR and Legal & Compliance. Fore eg. A GS 360O portal was developed which had all the information pertaining to a particular employee including his salary slips, leaves, healthcare benefits, performance reviews etc. * Thus as can be seen technology plays a big role in ensuring that Goldman Sachs maintains its positions as one of the top investment banks of the world and it can also be gauged from the fact that Goldman Sachs currently has 8000 employees working as technologists - the largest in any division.

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