Podcast with Eva Wiecko on investment banking and Goldman Sachs

Every children's book teaches your kid to be the lone hero. Goldman Sachs Managing Director Eva Wiecko argues this hero culture is the single biggest obstacle to collaboration , in boardrooms, in society, and in how we raise the next generation. Listen to her perspective on what high-stakes M&A transactions reveal about human nature. Subscribe for more episodes on real-world collaboration. Eva Wiecko has spent nearly 14 years at Goldman Sachs, rising to Managing Director in investment banking's M&A department. Her perspective on collaboration is shaped by leading teams through some of Germany's largest corporate transactions , including restructuring the utility industry in a deal involving RWE, E.ON, and Innogy , where billions of euros and thousands of jobs depend on people with fundamentally different interests finding common ground. The conversation opens with Wiecko's description of two distinct collaborative environments. Internal team collaboration at Goldman is relatively straightforward: flat working styles, clear hierarchy, shared understanding of roles, and a talent acquisition process that selects for collaborative capacity. New teams form every few months and function quickly because everyone understands the operating model. Client collaboration is where the real complexity lives. Wiecko uses a hospital metaphor: Goldman is the hospital, the client is the patient who only comes because they need help. For the client, a merger or acquisition represents a once-in-a-generation transformation , extraordinarily stressful and unfamiliar. The first task is not strategy but trust: convincing the client that you are on the same side and will adapt your pace to their needs. This requires reading organizational culture, understanding power dynamics, and recognizing that the client's emotional state is as important as their financial position. The discussion addresses what happens when collaboration fails in high-stakes transactions. Wiecko describes how misaligned incentives between different advisory firms working on the same deal can create destructive competition disguised as collaboration. When each firm optimizes for its own fee structure rather than the client's outcome, the transaction suffers , and sometimes collapses entirely. On cross-cultural collaboration, Wiecko draws from transactions involving Chinese, Brazilian, and German companies. Her observation is that human motivations are remarkably consistent across cultures: people want financial security and the feeling that they are part of something important and relevant. The differences are in communication style and decision-making process, not in fundamental drives. The most striking insight concerns the model of human behavior that guides her work. It is not Homo economicus optimizing financial returns, but Homo economicus optimizing social relevance , the feeling of being heard, appreciated, and meaningful within a firm and society. Even people with enormous capital feel insecure when they feel irrelevant. This reframing of economic motivation as fundamentally social has direct implications for how collaboration is structured and sustained. When asked what she would change about humans, Wiecko targets the hero culture , and specifically how it is transmitted through children's books that celebrate the lone hero, not the team. Changing this narrative through education, she argues, would do more for collaboration than any structural reform. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.