Lloyd Blankfein is in need of advice on the principles of business. Fortunately, I have just the man to give it to him: Hannu Penttilä, a Finnish shopkeeper who runs a chain of department stores.

His company, Stockmann, and the mighty Goldman Sachs are rather similar. Both have both been around for 150 years. Both are good at what they do. Yet when it comes to explaining how they conduct themselves, the US bank makes the most horrible hash of it, while the Finnish retailer gets it just right.

Last week Goldman produced a 63-page document on how it proposes to clean up its act, which began with The Goldman Sachs Business Principles. These are 14 in number, which is far too many for anyone to remember, even for Goldman people who, as the bank says, are the very best. Each principle is rather long, and after having read and reread them I am left feeling exasperated, confused and as if I've been lightly clubbed around the head.

Still, at least the first principle is pithy and memorable. "Our clients always come first," it says. There is only one problem with this: it isn't true. Not only is it not true in specific cases (like when Goldman sold "shitty deals" to clients and bragged about them), it isn't true generally. Any bank really interested in its clients would shut down most of its M&A department on the grounds that buying other companies almost always works out badly.

The second principle is a long screed about Goldman's "unswerving adherence" to being legal and ethical, with the result that the bank's speciality - generating profit - gets shunted into third place. "Our goal is to provide superior returns to our shareholders," the principle starts, making it sound almost altruistic. There is no mention of anything as vulgar as money; the word "superior" is pleasingly ungreedy. "Profitability is critical to achieving superior returns," it explains, passing off a tautology as if it were an insight.

David Fuller's view I do question the wisdom of people who approved this farrago of cant, placed beneath a politically correct photo.