Doriot’s Impact on Europe

The article about General Georges Doriot in the June issue is quite informative about his great accomplishments. Left without mention, however, was the first venture capital firm in Europe, called European Enterprises Development (EED). Founded in the late 1960s, with Doriot’s ARD holding a significant stake, the company had some 63 European financial institutions and banks as shareholders. Management included a stellar group of French business luminaries. The EED investment port-folio grew over time, but Europe (even the United Kingdom then) lacked financial markets that could and would welcome dynamic and burgeoning new ventures. Yet EED was the European incubator for the methods and structures of venture capital as it has since evolved and flourished.

Tony Pell (PMD 20, 1970)
Salt Point, NY

More on Doriot’s European Ventures

I read with great interest the article concerning General Doriot and venture capital. While the article quite understandably concentrated on the contribution he made in nurturing venture capital in the United States, the picture is not complete without reference to his introduction of venture capital to continental Europe in the late 1960s. Using ARD as a vehicle and organizing the financial support of some twenty international banks, General Doriot set up a holding company in Luxembourg called European Enterprises Development S.A., known under the acronym EED, with a Paris-based operating arm SED. General Doriot drew extensively on the loyal support of many European HBS alumni, most of whom he had taught. Arnaud de Vitry (MBA ’53) headed up the operations. I had the pleasure of being a member of the team for seven years starting in 1970. They were heady, pioneer days fraught with many difficulties, but we benefited from the wisdom and experience of the General, imparted by him through frequent contact and regular visits.

Deryck Tweedley (MBA ’58)
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Doriot Taught Standards of Behavior

Your article on Professor Doriot brought back great memories. I’ve often thought that he was my most influential professor. He taught us about the fundamentals of manufacturing, but the most important things he taught us were a variety of philosophies and standards of behavior that have served society and all of us students well.

Gilbert Richards (MBA ’52)
Key Largo, FL

Another Side of Doriot

The Georges Doriot story reminded me of the only contact I ever had with him, a telephone conversation in late August 1966 when I returned to Boston from my honeymoon. I picked up the phone, and someone with a very heavy French accent said, “Is this Ronald Demer?”It sounded like the French actor Charles Boyer, and I thought that a friend was kidding around so I said, “Yes, and who the hell is this?” The reply: “Georges Doriot. You are a friend of Phil Platt’s? Did you know that he committed suicide on Martha’s Vineyard?”

Phil was a very close friend and the person who got me interested in HBS. After getting his MBA in 1963, Platt joined Doriot at ARD. I was shocked and very upset. Doriot continued, “Did you know of any problems with investments or circumstances of his employment at ARD that might have caused him to take his own life?” I said that I did not, and we ended the call.

It was apparent to me that Doriot must have found my name in Phil’s Rolodex and was calling his friends to determine if the tragedy was related to Phil’s work at ARD. Unfortun-ately, Doriot’s blunt manner, with no prelude or “I have some bad news for you,” left me with the impression, which I still have forty years later, that he cared more about his company than about Phil.

Ron Demer (MBA ’64)
Ithaca, NY

Happy to Be in the GOP

We hope the Bulletin will also make space for an official of the Republican Party to counter the June article “You Only Thought You Were Republican,” by Andrew Tobias (MBA ’72), treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. On the face of it, Tobias’s statement that “we HBS alums are by now almost all Democrats.... Some of us… just don’t know it,” is absurd and, to us, offensive.

Tobias makes bold and unsupported statements about the political, economic, and social views of HBS alumni. He states that the “once-moderate centrist Republican Party has shifted to the right edge of the scale” and goes on to promote Democrats’ “market-oriented, solutions-driven politics.” Please note that the Republican standard-bearer, John McCain, is well in the center of American politics. Barack Obama, by contrast, is the most liberal U.S. senator. When it comes to the presidential arena, of course, HBS alumni are well-represented in the Republican Party, including President George W. Bush (MBA ’75) and former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney (MBA ’74).

It is beyond this letter’s scope to counter Tobias’s many fallacious arguments about the national debt, in which he ascribes no responsibility to the congressional Democrats who originated most of the spending over the past half-century. If Tobias feels his income is, and estate will be, undertaxed he can voluntarily pay more to the U.S. Treasury and also move from Florida (his residence as listed in the HBS directory) to New York.

Roberts W. Brokaw III (MBA ’74)
Wilmington, DE

Steven W. McConnell (MBA ’74)
Stockton, NJ

Democrats Err on Abortion Rights

I was fine with Andrew Tobias’s view that we’re all Democrats until his statement about the government stepping into a daughter’s agonizing medical decisions. I assume he was talking about abortion.

The Democrats cannot understand that the government, in the name of us citizens, has legitimate concerns about the lives of unborn children. Once a woman decides she does not want a child, then society acting through the government has a right (many say a duty) to protect the child.

This stark contradiction in the Democrats’ otherwise pro-life, pro-people, and pro-working-class policies is an albatross that continues to drag them down.

Mike Clement (MBA ’71)
Birmingham, MI

Going Straight D

Andrew Tobias notes that the political landscape has shifted to the right since he graduated in 1972. The “once-moderate centrist Republican Party has shifted to the right edge of the scale, ten clicks to your fellow alumni right.” Right on, I would concur. That’s why I made the switch from straight R to straight D some years ago. Come on over — you’ll feel better about yourself.

George M. (“Murph”) Levin Jr. (MBA ’68)
New York, NY

Christensen’s Work Lives On

Your article in March on C. Roland Christensen brought back fond memories. As a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, at his request, I took a course he had revised for blossoming education professionals. He then became my doctoral thesis adviser.

It was a marvelous course. He clearly had worked hard to adapt it to the particular needs of the Ed School. I realized both the great talent and the enormous amount of work that his method required when he asked me one day to teach a session of the course when he was away for a week. It took me two solid weeks of preparation, and a large amount of consultation with him, to try to meet his expectations in running a single class of his in his absence. Although it was a marvelous experience (and, I think, a reasonably good class) and I was very proud to have done it, I was also very relieved when he returned.

I am sure that this experience was repeated in many different places in the University, and even then it is difficult to grasp how very much he contributed to many people of many different disciplines. I think it is primarily in this sense that he lives on.

Kadimah Michelson (Ed.M. ’87, Ed.D. ’94)
Brookline, MA

Class Was a Thrill

To open the “Acoustic Research” case, Professor Christensen turned to one of my sectionmates (I wish I could remember who it was!) and said something like this: “I was out at the company this week and had lunch with the brass. We were all at one oblong table. Mr. X, tell us where everyone sat.”Â

It was the most electric moment of my two years.  It was a fair question, and by the third class we were supposed to understand quite a lot about not only the company but also the people, personalities, power struggles, etc. Who else would have done that? I still get chills forty years later when I think about it. He pushed the envelope long before we knew the term. What a thrill it was to take his class!

Ken Brasfield (MBA ’68)
Nantucket, MA

We welcome your letters. Send them to: Editor, HBS Alumni Bulletin, Soldiers Field, Boston, MA 02163

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