ALUMNI ACHIEVERS: Cohen, Yeo, Moore, and Donaldson at a reception in the Deanââ¬â¢s Garden.

PHOTO BY STUART CAHILL

To the four HBS graduates receiving this year’s Alumni Achievement Award, the School’s highest honor, HBS professor Bill Sahlman mischievously posed what he termed a simple question: “What is wisdom?” With Burden Hall packed with an audience of first-year MBA students, the honorees at the September event rose to the challenge and did not disappoint with their responses to that and other related questions. Couching their remarks in equal measures of humor and hard-won experience, the award winners shared advice and reflections during a discussion, moderated by Sahlman, as well as during a subsequent Q&A session with the students that concluded the program.

After Dean Jay Light introduced the honorees and presented them with their awards, Sahlman kicked off the discussion by saying that he hoped to elicit from the award winners some of their “accumulated knowledge and insight.” Then came his “wisdom” cold call, directed to Sir Ronald Cohen.

After noting that he would be wise to avoid answering such a question, Cohen observed that wisdom “has to stand the test of time and have a very broad perspective within which to put it. You never achieve it totally.”

Philip Yeo drew laughter when he said, “To me, wisdom is stealing ideas from others.” “Wisdom is not a destination but something that’s built upon as the years go by,” Bill Donaldson commented, adding that “there’s a danger in conceiving of wisdom as simply the sum total of life’s experience.” “I agree with Bill. I know a lot of old people who are not wise,” Ann Moore concluded to laughter and applause from the audience. “You need to age with an open mind.”

Sir Ronald M. Cohen (MBA ’69)
The cofounder and former chairman of London-based Apax Partners, one of the world’s leading venture-capital and private-equity firms, Ronnie Cohen and his parents emigrated, with virtually no possessions, to England from Egypt in 1956. Often said to be the father of the venture-capital industry in Europe, the Oxford graduate now devotes his time to socially oriented investment and entrepreneurship projects in England and the Middle East.

William H. Donaldson (MBA ’58)
The cofounder and former chairman and CEO of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Bill Donaldson has spent more than 45 years at the highest levels of business, government, and academia, with service as U.S. undersecretary of state; chairman and CEO of the NYSE; chairman of the SEC; and founding dean of the Yale School of Management.

Ann S. Moore (MBA ’78)
Ann Moore’s appointment as chairman and CEO of Time, Inc., in 2002 was a proud moment for a woman who, fresh out of HBS, had taken the lowest-paying of thirteen job offers to become a Time financial analyst simply because she loved magazines. Rising through the ranks, Moore today presides over an empire of more than 145 magazines, their Web sites, and brand extensions.

Philip L. Yeo (MBA ’76)
Currently the chairman of Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Philip Yeo has for many years overseen the planning and implementation of the key drivers of Singapore’s remarkable economic successes. Now Yeo is pushing the 250-square-mile city-state to the forefront of the global race for supremacy in biomedical sciences.

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