Newsmakers
Rags to Riches
Husnu Ozyegin (MBA ’69) is the richest man in Turkey, and he’s enjoying his wealth by giving lots of it away. Since 2000, he’s doled out some $50 million, building 36 primary schools and girls’ dormitories in Turkey’s poorest regions, the New York Times (December 14, 2007) reported. “If I can have an impact on 1 million Turkish people in the next ten years, I will be happy,” he declared.
The founder and chairman of Istanbul-based Finansbank, Ozyegin said of his self-made success, “I’m first generation; that gives me satisfaction. Getting to the top is not so easy; staying there is more difficult.” Ozyegin sees education as Turkey’s major challenge. In addition to his support for public schools, he plans to spend $1 billion over the next 15 years to establish a private university. “My vision is that we can train and export people like India does. I want Turkey to have the same education levels as Europe 25 years from now.”
Good Luck Charm
Far from the Great White Way, the Big Apple also shines brightly, in the neighborhood arts-and-culture scene that thrives throughout the city’s boroughs. Those lively goings-on are often made possible through the good work of
Lisa Quiroz (MBA ’90), senior vice president for corporate responsibility at Time Warner, who said the satisfaction she gets from helping deserving local organizations makes her “the luckiest girl in the world.”
In 2006, Time Warner gave a total of $50 million to support arts and education in New York City, and it is Quiroz that has “put that company at the forefront of corporate giving in the city,” New York’s cultural affairs commissioner Kate Levin told the New York Times (November 12, 2007). Time Warner believes that such philanthropy can help build audiences and spur creative innovation, all of which benefits the media and entertainment giant as well as the city it calls home. The company’s grants support Lincoln Center but also local performing- and community-arts groups and schools.
For Quiroz, who grew up on Staten Island, attending events all over the city has made her feel “like I rediscovered New York.” She’s also been noticed by Time Warner chairman Richard Parsons, who said, “Lisa is a person with a big heart and a great business head.”
Supporting the Troops
Kohlberg
Photo Courtesy Kohlberg Foundation
Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are uncertain not only about their long-term health-care benefits, but also about the education benefits that were an inducement for many to enlist. The GI Bill, they find, often falls short of their needs.
Jerome Kohlberg (MBA 11/’47), cofounder of the Wall Street firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, served in the Navy in World War II and says the GI Bill helped him earn degrees from Swarthmore College, HBS, and Columbia Law School. “I benefited tremendously,” Kohlberg told columnist Ellis Henican of Newsday (November 28, 2007). “It enabled me to broaden my
experience and background and make me valuable to a series of employers and legal firms.” Kohlberg has set up a $4 million Fund for Veterans’ Education, which awards scholarships to two veterans in every state. “Veterans will be the backbone of this country, the same as they were before,” Kohlberg said. “We just have to help a little.”
He’s Back
Formerly NBA senior vice president for business and league operations, Dennis Robinson (MBA ’90) is the new president and CEO of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, overseer of the Meadowlands Sports Complex, which Robinson led for a time in the late 1990s.
Himself a former athlete (at Wesleyan, he returned three punts for touchdowns and led the NCAA’s Division III in average punt-return yards his senior year), Robinson returns to his former stomping grounds at a busy time. Several big projects are in progress: a $2 billion shopping and entertainment complex; a $175 million rail link; and the new $1.3 billion Giants/Jets football stadium, which is due for completion in 2010. These undertakings are major priorities, of course, but when Robinson told the (Bergen County, NJ) Record (December 3, 2007), “My fundamental goal is to ensure that the Meadowlands remains No. 1 in North America, if not the world,” he was talking about harness racing. Who knew?
Of his management style, Robinson said, “Everyone approaches challenges differently, which doesn’t mean one way is right or another is wrong. The only question to me is, ‘Are you effective?’ ”
The Last Frontier
Booth Gardner (MBA ’63), the popular two-term governor of the state of Washington in the 1980s and ’90s, has embarked on his last campaign, “the biggest fight of my career,” he told the New York Times Magazine (December 2, 2007). Gardner, 71, who has Parkinson’s, wants to make it legal in his home state for people with debilitating but nonterminal diseases like his to receive, with a doctor’s assistance, drugs with which they may take their own lives.
Explained Gardner, “Why do this? I want to be involved in public life. I was looking for an issue, and this one fell in my lap. One advantage I have...is that people like me. The other is that my logic is impeccable. My life, my death, my control.”
The article noted, “Gardner does not live like a man waiting to die” as he works out regularly and prepares to climb Mt. Rainier. The awkward physical symptoms of his disease simply do “not fit with my concept of who I am,” Gardner said.
You’re an Old Fuelie
For his first year at HBS, Jan Hyde (MBA ’66) arrived in style, driving all the way from San Francisco to Soldiers Field behind the wheel of a silver-and-white 1960 Chevrolet Corvette, a fuel-injected model known to aficionados as a “Fuelie.” Fuel injection in those precomputer days was exciting but not widely understood. “It’s a beautifully engineered system that I think was maybe more like a solution looking for a problem,” Hyde explained to the New York Times (December 2, 2007).
After a career in real estate and investment banking consulting, and a brief foray into competitive driving, Hyde, a New Yorker, now devotes himself to keeping that same 1960 Fuelie active and purring and documenting the history of Corvette racing, heretofore a virtual tabula rasa. Hyde and other fans are working on an online registry (registryofcorvetteracecars.com) that tries to document every Corvette — about 2,500 or so — that ever raced in an official series. “It’s my full-time occupation now,” Hyde said. “I’m enjoying the hell out of it.”
