Newsmakers
A Roundup of Media Mentions
Meg’s World: Meg Whitman (MBA ’79)
Center Court: Alan Schwartz (MBA ’54)
Acing Reality: Willis C. (“Chip”) Arndt (MBA ’97)
Marriage, Inc.: Rachel Greenwald (MBA ’93)
Stealth Mogul: Jonathan Nelson (MBA ’83)
Thought Leader: Donald Davidson (MBA ’42)
Hoop Dreams: Steve Belkin (MBA ’71)
UNC’s “Accidental” Dean: Steve Jones (MBA ’78)
Spreading the Words: Carey Cook (MBA ’69)
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| Whitman Photo by Evan Kafka |
Whitman garnered all this attention the old-fashioned way: She earned it. During her five years at the helm of eBay, the company has rocketed from start-up to full-fledged powerhouse, with revenue on track to top $2 billion this year. With more than 28 million active users, eBay dominates the online auction marketplace.
Whitman came straight to HBS after graduating from Princeton with a degree in economics. She held six corporate and consulting jobs before joining eBay in 1998. Unassuming and low-key, Whitman told Fortune (August 11, 2003) that all the credit for her success goes to eBay’s customers: “This company truly is built by the community of users.”
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| Schwartz with Roddick: 30 million players for Team USA? Photo Courtesy USTA |
Schwartz, who captained the Yale tennis team and still plays regularly, is the founder of Tennis Corporation of America, which owns and operates forty indoor clubs in North America. Last January, he was named president of the 670,000-member USTA, a not-for-profit organization that funds nearly one hundred professional circuit events in the United States and selects the teams for the Davis Cup, Fed Cup, Olympic, and Paralympic Games. Schwartz’s goals include upgrading the USTA National Tennis Center in New York (the Open’s home); expanding programs in the inner cities; and working more closely with other allied tennis organizations, to serve as “an umbrella, not a gorilla.”
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| Arndt and Lehmkuhl: racing around the world. Photo by Tony Esparza/CBS |
The race was grueling — USA Today described their defining moment as being when “Chip and Reichen raced Millie and Chuck for a horse and buggy. Chip whacked Millie in the head; she smacked him back, splitting his lip” (September 18, 2003). But the rewards were substantial. The pair accepted a check for $1 million on The Early Show, and several weeks later Lehmkuhl, an actor, landed a cameo on the television series Frasier. Arndt has returned to his media-consulting practice and is using his celebrity to educate people on gay and lesbian issues and to promote human rights.
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While some may cringe at the thought of using direct mail to announce one’s availability, Greenwald assures them that assertively seeking a mate is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not cold, Greenwald explained to NPR’s Weekend Edition (September 28, 2003). “It’s effective time management. You are using time-tested, proven tactics from the business world and applying them in the dating world and getting results.” Who can argue with that? (For more information: www.FindAHusbandAfter35.com).
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| Nelson at right with partners Paul J. Salem (MBA ’91), left, and Glenn M. Creamer (MBA ’88). Photo by Jodi Hilton |
Nelson cofounded the Providence, Rhode Island, firm in 1991 and has quietly grown it into a $5 billion juggernaut. The company reports that it has produced average annual returns above 70 percent from year one. Yet for all its success, the firm has gone largely unnoticed in the business press. “I love the fact that we are not covered,” Nelson told the Times.
Among its successes, Providence turned its founding investment in cellular telephone operator VoiceStream Wireless into a hefty return when Deutsche Telekom bought the company and renamed it T-Mobile. It purchased and revived Wired magazine before selling it at a sizable profit to CondŽ Nast. Last year, Providence led a consortium that bought the largest cable television company in Europe.
A native of Providence and a graduate of Brown University, Nelson is content to stay put in his hometown. But success comes at a price. Providence has finally decided to open an office in Manhattan where maintaining its low profile will be a challenge.
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| Courtesy Cambridge University Press |
Donald Davidson (MBA ’42), a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former president of the American Philosophical Association, died last August at the age of 86. Davidson deeply influenced the field of philosophy by applying “methods of logical and linguistic analysis to the study of human nature and consciousness,” the Telegraph reported. Among his central achievements was to shed light on the nature of reality. By persuasively advancing “Wittgenstein’s notion that social interaction is the basis of knowledge,” he undermined Descartes’ long-dominant idea that the individual mind (“I think, therefore I am”) could by itself know about the world.
The nature of Davidson’s reality was broad indeed. He was a mountain climber, surfer, pilot, and accomplished pianist (who played duets with his Harvard College classmate, Leonard Bernstein). After a stint writing Hollywood radio scripts for Edward G. Robinson, he returned to Harvard to study philosophy. He simultaneously enrolled at HBS “despite being a Ôfellow traveler’ with communist friends,” as he later told an interviewer (New York Times, September 4, 2003). He left Harvard to join the Navy during World War II, where he spent three years training pilots, before returning to complete his philosophy studies.
Davidson’s writings consisted primarily of “short, crisp intellectually dense papers, rather than books,” according to the Times. A collection of essays about his work by prominent scholars was published in October.
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| Belkin Photo Republished with permission of Globe Newspaper Company, INC. |
But when the Atlanta Hawks surfaced as a hot prospect last August, Belkin moved quickly with seven partners to purchase the Hawks, the Thrashers hockey team, and operating rights to downtown Atlanta’s Philips Arena from AOL Time Warner.
“It just illustrates to me, don’t give up on your dreams,” Belkin told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (September 21, 2003). As the largest single investor in the ownership group, he plans to focus his attention on building the Hawks into a championship-caliber team. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but that’s what we’re going to plan for,” said Belkin, who will now divide his time between homes in Boston and Atlanta.
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| Jones Courtesy UNC Kenan-Flagler |
It’s not quite as improbable as it seems. Jones grew up in western North Carolina and graduated from Chapel Hill in 1974. After earning his MBA, he worked for General Electric and McKinsey before packing his bags for Australia, where he worked for ANZ, one of the country’s major banks. In 1996, Jones was named CEO of Suncorp Metway Ltd., a leading Australian banking, insurance, and investment funds manager.
Homeward bound with his wife and their four school-age children, Jones planned to take it easy for a while. But the search committee at Kenan-Flagler had other ideas. They figured that his impressive business credentials and international perspective would serve the school well. “They were as open to a practitioner for the role as they were for an academic,” Jones told the Herald-Sun.
Thrilled to be back home, Jones aims to lead the highly regarded business school to a new level of excellence. “This is not a job,” he said. “It’s a labor of love.”
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| Jan and Carey Cook: word power on the Net. Photo by R. Costantini |
A whimsical faculty of cartoon characters, including Dean Cinny Nym and Chancellor Dick Shinary, introduce users to different learning activities. Cook drew the characters and came up with concepts, and Jan guided content development to meet the needs of classroom teachers.
Fast forward to 2003, and the Cooks are still at it. While Cook hasn’t given up his day job doing stock market research for a San Francisco investment firm, he and Jan now spend twenty to thirty hours a week adding to the site from a spare room in their Menlo Park home. “It’s a passion,” Cook told the San Jose Mercury News (April 8, 2003). “We’re making a difference, and it’s fun.”
With zero marketing budget, the Cooks have slowly built a loyal following of teachers and students. More than 110,000 people now visit the free Web site each month, 10 percent of them from abroad. “It’s been like a pebble in a pond,” Cook said of the site’s spreading popularity. (While vocabulary.com is free, the Cooks earn a trickle of income from national syndication of their daily word puzzle called Rootonym.)
Even as they invest more time in developing the Web site, the Cooks wouldn’t think of charging users an access fee. They told Gentry Magazine (October 2003) that the pleasure they derive from the project provides them with plenty of “psychic income.”
