Alumni in the News
Sunshine State
GREENE: Sitting pretty after hedging his bets.
Carl Juste/Miami Herald
Riffing off the famous opening lines of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, reporter John Dorschner set the stage in the Miami Herald (December 7, 2009) for the saga of Jeff Greene (MBA ’79): “Years later, as he faced the implications of his audacious $800 million bet against subprime mortgages, Jeff Greene was to remember that distant day when his father took him to discover vending machines.”
Indeed, Greene never forgot when he was 14 and living in Worcester, Massachusetts, and his father was forced to take a job filling vending machines after his textile-equipment business collapsed. The younger Greene ended up making a fortune in Southern California real estate; later, his success at subprime hedging earned him the title “The Meltdown Mogul” from the Wall Street Journal.
Once the host of star-studded parties at his Malibu home, Greene is now a married man (boxer Mike Tyson was his best man) and a father, living in South Florida, enjoying perks such as a 145-foot yacht. As for real estate, Greene is staying away from it; he predicts that “there will be a lot of foreclosures in 2010, especially in retail, office, hotels, and high-end homes.”
Too Cool for School
KHAN: Using software and videos to create an education revolution.
Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle
Salman Khan (MBA ’03) was working at a hedge fund in 2004 when he began tutoring his young cousin in math, using the phone and Yahoo!’s Doodle site. Soon, the San Francisco Chronicle (December 14, 2009) reported, other relatives and family friends were clamoring for his services. Eventually he began posting instructional videos on YouTube; to date, more than 1,200 of them have been viewed over 10 million times. That, Khan says, surpasses the views recorded by any other open source video content provider, including large universities. Khan quit his finance job in 2009 and turned his full attention to his online, not-for-profit endeavor, Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org). The academy focuses on K–12 learning with a hands-on approach that uses automated software and videos. Volunteers have begun translating the videos into other languages, and Khan’s mission has become to make a free, world-class education available to anyone, anywhere.
Spin Cycle
Courtesy Cycle For Survival
In 2004 at age 33, Jennifer Goodman Linn (MBA ’99) was diagnosed with MFH sarcoma, a rare soft-tissue cancer. Through 26 months of chemotherapy and four surgeries, Linn kept up her fitness, mainly through indoor stationary biking, or spinning. She and her husband, Dave Linn (MBA ’00), later organized the annual Cycle for Survival (www.CycleForSurvival.org), an indoor team cycling fundraising competition. A January event in New York City featured more than 2,000 participants, received donations from thousands of individuals, and raised over $2 million for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. “Cancer has not forced me to change my life,” says Linn. “The irony is that cancer has been one of the best things that ever happened to me.”
The Heart of the Deal
BURKE: Behind a complicated deal, some high-profile HBSers and cloak-and-dagger secrecy.
Stephen Chernin/Getty Images
Comcast’s bid for a controlling stake in NBC Universal was a complex deal that featured many HBS alumni in starring, supporting, and back-story roles. Steve Burke (MBA ’82), the COO of Comcast who will run the new enterprise, has high-profile business, especially TV business, in his genes. His father, Dan Burke (MBA ’55), is the former CEO of Capital Cities/ABC and a television industry legend; and an uncle, James Burke (MBA ’49), was chairman of Johnson & Johnson during the 1982 Tylenol tampering incident and became famous for his leadership through that crisis. His brother, Bill Burke (MBA ’92), was president of TBS, later headed up the Weather Channel, and authored a biography of Ted Turner.
CEO Jeff Immelt (MBA ’82) of General Electric, which owned NBC Universal, was an HBS classmate of Burke’s, a connection that led to the code word “Crimson” during part of the deal’s secret negotiations, the New York Times (December 3, 2009) reported.
The transaction “began in earnest” last March, according to the Times, when Steve Burke and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts met with Burke’s sectionmate, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon (MBA ’82).
What Happened to Leadership?
IMMELT: A prescription to fix failures at the top.
Sgt. Vincent Fusco/Usma
For a speech on “Reviving American Leadership,” General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt (MBA ’82) chose a discerning audience: the corps of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy. Citing the military as a notable exception, Immelt deplored the breakdown of leadership in America in recent years: “Tough-mindedness, a good trait, was replaced by meanness and greed — both terrible traits. Rewards became perverted. The richest people made the most mistakes, with the least accountability. In too many situations, leaders divided us instead of bringing us together” (Reuters, December 9, 2009).
Immelt went on to say that leaders “share a common responsibility to narrow the gap between the weak and the strong. I have taken on the challenge to increase manufacturing jobs in the United States. These are the jobs that have created the midwestern middle class for generations. Manufacturing jobs paid for college educations, including mine.” He called on the private sector to work with government — “a catalyst for leadership and change” — to set goals for productivity, job creation, and exports. Immelt listed several requirements of leaders: They need to be “systems thinkers” as well as eclectic and attentive listeners. And, he said, they must like and respect people and be able to motivate, build competence, move quickly, and execute.
Star Turn
Courtesy Ascent Media
Once an IT staffer at HBS, José Royo (MBA ’98) is CEO of Ascent Media Group, which provides postproduction and digital media services to Hollywood’s major movie studios. Royo earned a Ph.D. in East Asian studies from Harvard, where he was an adjunct professor while also helping to set up HBS’s intranet service. At the urging of former Dean Kim Clark , he enrolled in the MBA Program.
On his switch from academia to the private sector, Royo explained to the Los Angeles Times (December 6, 2009), “Back in 1997 and 1998, there was an enormous sense of excitement about this thing called the Internet and about how it was going to transform our lives. I felt if I could somehow be a part of that, I could have a more profound effect on the lives of people than a more narrowly defined career in Asian studies.”
