Newsmakers

• Start-Up Success
• A Fine Collection
• In the Driver's Seat
• Blue No Longer
• East Side Story

Start-Up Success

When the HBS student soccer team had to pull out of the National MBA Soccer Tournament two weeks before it was scheduled to begin last February, defending the School's honor fell to a group of HBS alumni booters. Not to worry — the recently formed HBS Alumni Soccer team leaped into the breach and surprised everyone (including itself) by walking away with the hotly contested championship trophy.

At the event, held at the University of Texas in Austin, the HBS alumni squad dispatched teams from Texas A&M, Kellogg, Chicago, Yale, Wharton, and, in the final, Texas Law. (The lawyers were called in to provide some Longhorn representation.) Partying is part of the scene, but “the competition aspect is really the main attraction,” said team organizer James Gowers (MBA '01). “Despite the fact that we didn't have the best talent and hadn't played together before — our players flew in for the game from London, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York — teamwork, discipline, and passion made the whole worth much more than its parts.”

The team (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HBSAlumniSoccer/) invites interested alumni to join them for the three annual U.S. MBA tournaments, which also welcome alumni and international teams to compete on a space-available basis.

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A Fine Collection

Dave Williams (MBA '61) and his wife, Reba White Williams (MBA '70), were Wall Street executives when they married in 1975. To ensure that their friends would not all be drawn from their work environment — which Reba Williams feared might turn the couple into “the narrowest people alive” — the Williamses sought to widen their social circle, according to an article in the New York Times (March 17, 2002). They gravitated toward the art world and began collecting prints, eventually amassing some six thousand works, mostly by American artists.

Last summer, in downtown Stamford, Connecticut, the Williamses bought a classic building (constructed in 1894, in a Neo-Italian Renaissance style) to house their collection. They do not intend to make it a museum, but instead will restrict access to scholars, researchers, art historians, and museum curators. “We're just not prepared to create a public space with a full-time staff,” explained Mrs. Williams, who earned a Ph.D. in art history in 1996. “We'd like to be compared to the New York Public Library's Print Room, where scholars from everywhere can come to work.”

Their collection, particularly noted for its Depression-era pieces, also includes prints by artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol; it is said by experts to be among the finest private collections of American prints in the world. As one museum curator noted, “Most museums don't have a collection that can rival it because most museums cannot spend the time and drive it takes to put it together.” Although the Stamford site will be closed to the general public, the prints can be viewed in traveling exhibits, thanks to a nonprofit organization the Williamses established in 1989 for that purpose.

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In the Driver's Seat

NASCAR racing is one of the more popular spectator sports in the country, but it's a tight little fraternity that's tough to join and expensive to belong to — maintaining a competitive team costs about $15 million per season. But die-hard racing buff Jeffrey Roe Hitchcock (MBA '90) wants ordinary fans to be able to get more closely involved than just smelling fumes at trackside. He has founded a company, Fanz Enterprises (http://fanzenterprises.com), that is selling stock at $10 a share in hopes of raising at least $10 million to field a NASCAR team. (If fewer than a million shares are sold, investors will get their money back with interest.) Sponsorships will be another important source of potential revenue.

“We're trying to take a different approach to the business than just, ‘Let's go racing,' ” Hitchcock told the Indianapolis Star (March 18, 2002), adding that fan response has been “crazy.” Hitchcock has hired a former NASCAR crew chief to be Fanz's spokesman, and he intends to seek out the best available personnel for crews and drivers. Among other perks of ownership, the stockholders will be able to vote on whom they want behind the wheel of the company car.

Hitchcock had toyed with the notion for Fanz before. But in 1999, when one of his newborn twin sons, Jackson Roscoe, died shortly after birth due to congenital heart disease complications, the idea took on a new reality for Hitchcock and his wife, Joni. “Jackson was the one who made me stop and do this,” Hitchcock said, explaining that the Jackson Roscoe Foundation, set up to benefit children's hospitals and medical research, will receive 2.5 percent of Fanz's pretax profits.

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Blue No Longer

In March, Louis Gerstner (MBA '65), IBM's CEO since 1993, stepped down after achieving a remarkable turnaround at Big Blue. Gerstner, who lacked any previous experience in the computer industry, frequently defied conventional management wisdom during his rescue of the troubled giant, as he recounted to the New York Times (March 10, 2002).

At the outset of his tenure, for example, Gerstner scoffed at the notion that a new vision needed to be articulated for the company. That would require “a yearlong debate,” he said, when what was needed was “to save the company economically.” A veteran of customer-oriented firms such as American Express and RJR Nabisco, Gerstner proceeded to shake up Big Blue's culture, reinventing IBM “from the customer back, not from the company out,” so the firm would become driven by the marketplace. He scrapped plans to split the company into several smaller units (“Baby Blues”) and concentrated instead on cutting costs (by paring the workforce and closing plants) and expanding IBM's capability to help companies meet the full range of their computing and IT needs. Keeping IBM intact “was a big risk, but I never doubted it was the right thing to do,” Gerstner said. In another bold move, Gerstner and IBM opted early on for open systems — despite the company's tradition of developing its own technology — and embraced the nascent Internet. Thus, when the Internet took off, creating a vast new world of potential customers, IBM's size was once again an advantage.

Asked what he would miss most, Gerstner, who will stay on as the company's chairman until the end of the year, replied, “I love winning. I get excited by our success. I get very frustrated by our failures, too, but I enjoy the game.”

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East Side Story

In January, veteran New York state senator Roy Goodman (MBA '53) was appointed president and CEO of the United Nations Development Corporation by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg (MBA '66). In accepting the position, Goodman, a fiscally conservative and socially liberal Republican, stepped down after representing the heavily Democratic “Silk Stocking” district of Manhattan's Upper East Side for 33 years. “It seemed an appropriate time to accept a new responsibility with a different scope,” said Goodman (New York Daily News, January 16, 2002), who will act as liaison between New York City and the United Nations and oversee $1.5 billion of new construction planned for the UN's Manhattan headquarters.

“The ornate Senate chamber at the state Capitol rang with accolades for the patrician legislator,” the Daily News reported, as colleagues bid farewell to Goodman. They praised him for his wisdom, compassion, empathy, and commitment to public service, noting as well his sense of humor and legendary vocabulary. During his career, Goodman was a strong advocate for the arts and cultural institutions, and sponsored more than one thousand bills covering issues from gun control to hate crimes.

“I very much regret having to leave the Senate, in many ways,” said Goodman, “but I'm very interested in the challenge that lies ahead at the UN.”

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