Newsmakers
A Roundup of Media Mentions
Unsung Hero: Celina Realuyo (MBA ’00)
Hopping to It: Antonio ("LA") Reid (AMP:ISMP 154)
Against All Odds: Ernesto Bertarelli (MBA ’93)
How Much is Fair?: Andrew Tobias (MBA ’72)
Leading the Charge: David ("Bull") Gurfein (MBA ’00)
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| Realuyo Photo by Tribune Media Services |
On September 11, 2001, Celina Realuyo (MBA ’00), a private banker at Goldman Sachs in London, watched in horror on her office TV as the attacks in New York City and Washington unfolded. A former U.S. Foreign Service officer who had worked at U.S. embassies in Spain and Panama as well as in the White House Situation Room, Realuyo had left government to attend HBS. Now, she realized, her country needed her once again.
“I was just so angry,” she told the Chicago Tribune (February 10, 2003), “and I was in a position to do something about it.” Realuyo left London and returned to Washington, where, with her banking and diplomatic skills, she became a policy advisor to the State Department’s Counterterrorism Finance and Designation Unit. She trains foreign government officials and bankers on procedures for preventing money laundering and disrupting terrorist finance networks. The job is as unglamorous as it is essential, and involves lots of meetings, planning sessions, reports, travel, and bureaucratic jousting. At the end of the day (usually very late at night), it also involves a much smaller paycheck. The work, Realuyo said, amounts to “just a piece of the puzzle. But it’s a big piece.”
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| Reid Photo courtesy of Arista |
When Antonio (“LA”) Reid (AMP:ISMP 154) succeeded the legendary Clive Davis at Arista Records, a lot of people wondered if he was up to the job. Sure, Reid had founded Atlanta–based hip–hop and R&B label LaFace and built it into a $100 million company, but Arista represented the full spectrum of pop music genres and featured a stable of veteran, big–time artists, including Aretha Franklin, Carlos Santana, and Bruce Springsteen.
As the New York Times (March 2, 2003) reported, Reid has “silenced his critics with a string of multi–million–selling albums, even in a period when sales are down sharply.” He’s also undergone a personal makeover, hitting the gym to shed fifty pounds, shaving his beard, and becoming more homebody than homeboy, enjoying domestic life with his wife and one–year–old daughter. “If you’re having a party,” he said, “you can bet I won’t be there.”
Arista is doing well, thanks to its established stars along with newcomers such as Pink, Avril Lavigne, Usher, and OutKast — the latter two, along with Santana, won Grammys this year. Asked about his goals for the company, Reid said, “Today my strategy is where is my next hit going to come from. My strategy in ten years will be the same damn strategy: Where will the next hit or the next star come from?”
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| Bertarelli Photo by Max Ranchi |
How’s this for a long shot? Representing a landlocked country in the world’s most prestigious ocean–racing competition, a first–time challenger goes halfway around the globe to the reigning champion’s home port, and without losing a single race, brings the America’s Cup to the Continent (a feat never accomplished by any other European country, despite 150 years of trying).
If it sounds almost as difficult as bringing a profitable drug to market, maybe that’s why Ernesto Bertarelli (MBA ’93), CEO of the Swiss biotech company Serono International, was equal to the task. As the Financial Times (February 27, 2003) explained, “Mr. Bertarelli runs his America’s Cup team like a small global company, with over one hundred team members, drawn from fifteen countries, and eight specialist units covering everything from boat design and sail making to professional sponsorship and training.”
“In challenging for the Cup, we had to choose our people at the beginning of the program and then could not change them,” Bertarelli said. “I think that is one of the most important decisions anyone ever has to make, be it in business or competition: Choose your people right.”
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| Tobias Photo courtesy of Harcourt |
Author and columnist Andrew Tobias (MBA ’72) discussed executive pay and American attitudes about compensation in an article in Parade magazine (March 2, 2003), for which he is personal finance editor.
Asking how much someone should be paid who runs “an outfit with 170,000 employees that’s critical to our national defense,” Tobias noted that description fits both the CEO of Boeing ($4 million annual salary, plus incentives compensation) and the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps ($169,860 annual salary). He acknowledged that “it is best left to the free market to decide” what executive compensation should be, but added that “the problem comes when the market isn’t really free, and the CEO largely sets his own pay.” He further pointed out that from 1980 to 2001, the average working person’s pay rose 74 percent, while CEO compensation climbed by 1,884 percent.
Tobias said he makes no judgment on these numbers and offers them in the spirit of debate and discussion. He concluded by citing a poll that showed that 19 percent of Americans believe they are among the richest 1 percent in the country; another 20 percent expect that they some day will be.
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| Gurfein Photo by Getty Images/Chris Hondros |
In the first days of military action in Iraq, with Americans unsure of what lay ahead, one commanding, symbolic image in this media–intensive war held sway: a U.S. Marine, ripping down a huge poster of Saddam Hussein in a town in southern Iraq. Those who know him weren’t surprised to see that it was David (“Bull”) Gurfein (MBA ’00), whose picture appeared on television sets and in newspapers around the world.
According to the New York Daily News (March 22, 2003), Gurfein wanted the gesture to reassure apprehensive Iraqis that this time, America was going to finish what the first Gulf War had left incomplete. Gurfein, a veteran of the 1991 conflict, said that Iraqis “are scared to show a lot of emotion. We wanted to show them that this time we’re here, and Saddam is gone.”
Gurfein, a major in the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, enlisted in the Corps when he was 17. A member of the Reserve, living near the World Trade Center at the time of the 9/11 attacks, he re-upped and went on to serve in Afghanistan, where he earned the Bronze Star, before moving on to Iraq.
