In May, the School's annual Alumni Achievement Award was conferred upon six alumni, while two faculty members received the HBS Distinguished Service Award. Profiles of the honorees follow.
Ralph M. Barford
Frank Batten
David J. Dunn
Ann M. Fudge
Ellen R. Marram
Robert F. McDermott
Martin V. Marshall
Arthur N. Turner
Founder and Managing Partner Idanta Partners Ltd.
Each year a host of bright-eyed entrepreneurs make their way to San Diego to explain their dreams to Dave Dunn, one of the nation's leading venture capitalists. For every seven hundred deals he and his four colleagues at Idanta Partners Ltd. consider, however, only one will win their support.
For the select few startups that pass through Idanta's screen - some thirty companies that have created more than 40,000 jobs since Dunn founded the firm in 1971- there are significant benefits. Positioning itself as a "value-added venture partner," Idanta works closely with entrepreneurs to build major businesses with a potential for sales of a half-billion dollars or more. Dunn has made long-term commitments - an average of twelve to fifteen years - a bulwark of his firm's philosophy.
Dunn's first big deal took place soon after he opened for business. An eight-year veteran with the prominent New York venture capital firm of J.H. Whitney & Company, he launched his own shop backed by $8 million from the Bass brothers. Seven Honeywell engineers in Boston had come up with a design for a minicomputer that was unbeatable in terms of price and performance. Putting in $300,000 for 60 percent of the equity, Dunn helped launch Prime Computer in 1972 and served as its chairman for the next seventeen years. With his hands-on help, Prime became an early high-tech success story, and Dunn's VC firm grew and prospered.
For young Dave Dunn growing up poor in a single-parent home in Brooklyn during the Great Depression, such success could not have seemed within reach. After graduating from a vocational high school, Dunn went to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1947, he joined the Marine Corps Reserves and was called to active duty three years later with the outbreak of the Korean War. Making the most of an unexpected opportunity to attend Annapolis, he entered the Naval Academy in 1951, graduating four years later with a degree in engineering and a commission as a Marine lieutenant.
While stationed in Hawaii, Dunn met a naval supply officer who was an HBS alumnus and who lent him copies of the Harvard Business Review. With a wife and children to support, Dunn decided that HBS would be a good choice when his tour of duty ended in 1959. Admitted to the Class of 1961, he earned his MBA as a Baker Scholar with high distinction. After a year at an investment bank, Dunn began his venture capital career at J.H. Whitney.
Having earned his education the hard way, Dunn is particularly interested in improving educational opportunities for new generations of students from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds and has provided funds to support them. As these students search for role models, they would do well to look to their benefactor, who worked his way up from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the business world.
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Executive Vice President, Kraft Foods, Inc.
President, Maxwell House
Coffee Company and Post Cereals
Last September, Ann Fudge took a sledgehammer to a boarded-up brownstone in Harlem. The building was slated to come down as part of an affordable-housing campaign - one hundred new homes in one hundred weeks for one hundred families - that she had initiated as Maxwell House's president. Pounding away steadily, Fudge eventually broke through.
The scene couldn't have been more symbolic of Fudge's life. As an African-American woman, she has been breaking down walls since she was a child, quietly dismantling the racial and gender barriers she's faced with a mix of hard work, determination, strength, and grace that has made her one of the most influential and noteworthy leaders in corporate America today.
For the past 21 years, Fudge has demonstrated a remarkable ability to lead teams, reposition products, and increase the bottom line. She climbed from marketing assistant to marketing director at General Mills from 1977 to 1986, when Philip Morris scooped her up for its General Foods division (which later merged with Kraft Foods). There she served in marketing posts and ultimately as a general manager. In 1994, she was put in charge of Maxwell House's $1.4 billion coffee business, and last September she took charge of Post Cereals as well - a $1.3 billion operation. Not surprisingly, the New York Times calls Fudge one of "the top twenty women in American industry."
It's the confidence instilled in her by her parents, Fudge says, that has allowed her to surmount the many career obstacles faced by African Americans, who still represent less than 5 percent of the Fortune 1000's senior managers. Fudge says she also received encouragement from the nuns in the Catholic schools she attended throughout grade school and high school in Washington, D.C. Charles A. Coverdale (MBA '71) and Margaret M. Hennig (MBA '64), who were faculty members at Simmons College where Fudge was an undergraduate, encouraged her to apply to HBS.
Fudge's achievements are all the more remarkable given that by her junior year in college, she was already a wife and mother. She deferred admission to HBS for two years while she worked in human resources for General Electric. She eventually matriculated at HBS, deftly juggling classes and childcare for her two young children.
Fudge has spent a significant amount of time working with nonprofits such as Partnership for a Drug-Free America, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and the United Way. She has also encouraged good citizenship at Maxwell House, initiating its community home-building effort last year in partnership with Habitat for Humanity. Not only have Maxwell House's profits doubled since Fudge took the helm, the company has also helped build scores of homes for low-income families across the country. Recognizing Fudge's many accomplishments, the HBS Network of Women Alumnae honored her last November with its own Alumna Achievement Award.
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