Dan Morrell: Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck. Where we come from and how we were raised has a profound effect on who we become. The recipients of this year’s Alumni Achievement Award grew up everywhere from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to New Orleans, Louisiana. One soloed in a single engine airplane on Long Island at the age of 14. Another toured Cleveland’s factories with her father at the height of the city’s industrial powers. That range of experiences played a part in who they became, and it shaped their enormously successful careers in industries ranging from venture capital, to energy, to beauty.

John Hess: Family is the greatest treasure you have in life, and your good name is the greatest gift you have in life.

Desiree Rogers: I was surrounded by this whole idea of, you know, education being so important in your life, particularly early on.

Gerald Schwartz: I think the real influence in where I grew up was where my father was. I had a wonderful relationship with him.

DM: In this special edition of Skydeck, associate editor Julia Hanna asked this year’s recipients of the School’s highest honor to share some of the personal details of how and where they grew up—and how that shaped the person they are today.

Photos by Susan Young

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Julia Hanna: John Hess (MBA 1977) is CEO of Hess Corporation, a global independent energy company engaged in the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas started in 1933, when Hess’s father Leon bought a secondhand truck and began delivering fuel oil to homes in New Jersey.

A thought leader for the energy industry, Hess serves on the board of trustees at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and is chairman of the board of the American Petroleum Institute. At Harvard and Harvard Business School, Hess learned the language of business and the languages of the countries where Hess did business, including Spanish, Arabic, and Farsi.

“I had no idea at the time that this investment in languages would be one of the smartest things I ever did,” he says. “As a leader, trying to understand and appreciate the cultures of the countries where you do business is key to building bridges of trust.” Now closing in on his 30th anniversary as CEO, Hess describes how his father started the company and the values both parents passed on to him.

John Hess: I grew up in Perth, Amboy, New Jersey, so I’m a Jersey boy and I’m proud of it. My dad never went to college. He was the fourth of four kids and the first three siblings went to college. They had the money, the Depression hit, there was nothing left for him. So he started to carry bags of coal on his back and said when he was about 16, there has to be a better way.

He founded our company in 1933 by driving a secondhand oil truck and just built this incredible independent energy company. And I’m really proud of that, but he always thought that hard work will get you ahead and you didn’t need school. On the other hand, my mom was a Phi Beta Kappa at Wellesley. Smart as a whip, and very high standards. But they both instilled in me and my two sisters the importance of family—that family is the greatest treasure you have in life, and your good name is the greatest gift you have in life. And that not only instilled values in me and my wife Susan, but has been passed on as our greatest legacy to our three sons.

JH: Fascinated by airplanes and the power of flight, Peter Crisp (MBA 1960) credits his parents with allowing him to solo in a single engine airplane at the age of 14, just two years after losing his older brother to leukemia. That passion for flying carried through to three years of service as an intelligence officer with the US Air Force, where he fought to become a pilot, but found a completely different path as a courier, delivering top secret documents to embassies around the world. Later, as an MBA, it also inspired him to write to Laurance Rockefeller after reading about Rockefeller’s early investments in what would become Eastern Air Lines and McDonnell Douglas.

That initial contact led to a 45-year relationship with Rockefeller and what would become Venrock Associates, the venture capital firm Crisp cofounded in 1969. Known for the firm’s investments in companies including Intel, Apple, and American Semiconductor, among many others, Crisp is also a dedicated philanthropist and served more than four decades on the board of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where his brother was treated so many years ago.

Peter Crisp My father made it clear that in the summertime I had to work and get a job. And I went to work when I was about 12 years old, for $4 a day as a worker on a large piece of property that was near where we lived. I’d bike to work and I’ll never forget that $4 a day. That was a big deal for me. But they were very permissive.

Even though my brother died when he was 13, my father let me solo in a single-engine airplane at the age of 14. Which, I’m surprised he would have let me do that when I was the last surviving member of the family. They had high expectations but were not demanding.

JH: Gwill York’s (MBA 1984) father Scott also went to HBS, and he brought Gwill along on the many factory tours that were part of his job as an analyst. Those formative experiences fed the younger York’s curiosity about the world. “I loved learning how capital and labor came together to create things,” she says. That same spirit of discovery would come in handy in York’s career as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist with 30 years of experience financing early-stage technology and healthcare companies. A founding managing director of the firm Lighthouse Capital Partners, York made Series A investments in companies including Netflix, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and NVIDIA, among many others.

Witnessing her parents’ commitment to activism and public service when she was growing up shaped York, who now serves on the boards of numerous organizations including One Mind, a nonprofit focused on catalyzing change in how mental health is treated and perceived, and 10 Million Names, a collaborative project dedicated to recovering the names of the estimated 10 million men, women, and children of African descent who were enslaved in the United States.

Gwill York: Even though I’ve lived in Boston for 50 years, I say I’m from Cleveland. I had a magical childhood in Cleveland. I grew up on the same street as my mother and her parents had built a house on this street. I went to the same all-girls school for 14 years. I lived in a Cleveland that was an industrial powerhouse that had 50 Fortune 500 companies in it. And my dad was an analyst. And so he was determined that I would see things. So I went to see paint being made, ball bearings, steel, all kinds of things, blades for jet engines in the TRW factory. So I have so many images from going to visit factories.

And then, Cleveland was a real melting pot. So almost every community that fled Europe after the First World and Second World Wars, and then also the Great Migration from the South when African Americans were fleeing the terror of the Southern states. So there were huge communities of all kinds of immigrants to Cleveland who came looking for jobs and were integrated into the workforce over time. And my parents were very much a part of that. Both my parents were very involved in the Civil Rights movement and the Women’s movement. So I just, uh, had an absolutely fabulous childhood walking in the woods with my dog, walking in the fields with my dog, had beautiful gardens, went to the symphony, went to the art museum all the time. Life was really good.

Both my parents, I think, at a very young age, they decided that they were ambitious for me. And my dad’s father had been chronically ill and my dad and his mother had to support the family and he started working pretty much full time at about 12. And he felt that it was really important that I know how to take care of myself. And he was angry that his mother had had fewer opportunities because of her gender. And so he was just really determined that I’d be independent and practical.

JH: Gerald Schwartz (MBA 1970) is founder and chairman of Onyx Corporation, a Toronto- based private equity firm with more than $50 billion in assets under management. As CEO of Onyx from its founding in 1984 until just last year, Schwartz led a number of significant acquisitions including Beatrice Foods, SkyChefs, Celestica, and in 2019, WestJet. Inducted into the Canadian Business Hall of Fame, Schwartz is also an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Yet his beginnings were modest. He grew up in the Canadian province of Manitoba, working at the elbow of his entrepreneurial father from age 10. Years later, Schwartz credits the values and lessons absorbed from those formative years for shaping his long-view, relationship-based approach to doing deals.

Gerald Schwartz: I grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, which is equivalent to a Midwestern city in the United States. Big enough to have lots of people, lots of friends, lots of things to do. And small enough to have a real small town outlook on life. I think the real influence in where I grew up was where my father was.

I had a wonderful relationship with him. He was through-and-through an entrepreneur. Did lots of different things, all as an entrepreneur. Ran a family business. My natural inclination to be interested in things entrepreneurial certainly came from my exposure and friendship and time with my father. So I think in terms of influence, in my case, that’s probably the largest influence. He had everything from a wrecking yard where they salvaged parts from cars to a machine shop where they rebuilt engines to a distribution supply business. He did lots of things and he did pretty much all of them very well. And he was a man of really important integrity and understood people and relationships. So I just grew up in that environment and absorbed it.

JH: A native of New Orleans, Louisiana, Desiree Rogers (MBA 1985) grew up in the historic 7th Ward, where she got a solid grounding in the importance of community, education, hard work, and service, thanks to her father—a teacher, coach, and city councilman—and her mother, an entrepreneur who started a chain of local daycare centers.

Rogers has enjoyed a career devoted to transforming organizations in the private and public sectors, including the Illinois Lottery, Integrys Energy Group, Allstate, and Johnson Publishing. She’s even served in the White House. leading innovative arts and cultural events as special assistant and social secretary to former President Barack Obama.

In 2019, she became co-owner and CEO of Black Opal, LLC, which includes the brands Black Opal Beauty and Fashion Fair Cosmetics. And while she’s lived in Chicago for decades now, Rogers continues to draw on the powerful spirit of community that shaped her childhood as she looks for ways to amplify her work with Black Opal by focusing on issues like the breast cancer survival rates for women of color. “The real goal here is not just about having the perfect shade of lipstick,” Rogers has said. “It’s about building trust and bringing people together to create change.”

Desiree Rogers: I grew up in New Orleans, and actually it’s amazing because today is Mardi Gras. I served as a two-time queen, I have to say that, but my family—I have a mother and dad, of course, and a brother. We were the, you know, family unit. And so I have a younger brother and my parents were very involved in education. And so my mother and her mother had daycare centers for young kids. And then my father taught in the public school system and was a coach and ultimately became a councilman, a city councilman. So education was kind of the core in our family, growing up. That was our jobs as kids. And so I volunteered at the daycare center. I read to the kids. I played with the kids. So I was surrounded by this whole idea of, you know, education being so important in your life, particularly early on. And so that was the cornerstone. And then the fun part, of course, my dad was very involved in Mardi Gras. Very involved in civic work and the importance of civic work.

And so we were around and surrounded by a lot of people that were moving the city forward, working in politics, council people, mayors, that kind of thing. So that was the backdrop and really having a real respect for the city of New Orleans. And really feeling like a part of that community. And so that was a very important part of our upbringing. The food, the culture, we’re descendants of Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen. Just really being a part of the community and being involved in some way, even as children.

This episode of Skydeck was edited by Jocelyn Gonzalez from PRX Productions, with assistance from Craig McDonald at HBS. It is available wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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