Dan Morrell: Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck. We all have early memories of on-the-job learnings—those moments that had a lasting impact on how we see the world of work and our place in it. This year’s recipients of the Alumni Achievement Award are no different. One spent a summer during college doing hard labor in a lumber mill. Another pumped gas and washed windshields as a teenager. Across a diversity of experiences, one thing is clear: Work does much more than pay the bills. It shapes who we are and our broader view of the world.

Desiree Rogers: I feel that it’s so important to have multiple voices across races, socioeconomic, and also age at the table.

Gerald Schwartz: Don’t do anything in your life that you don’t like doing or be with people you don’t want to associate with. It was a hard lesson to come by. It came very close to costing me an entire career.

DM: In this special edition of Skydeck, associate editor Julia Hanna asked this year’s recipients of the School’s highest honor to describe a work experience that has really stayed with them over the years and what they learned from it.

Photos by Susan Young

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Julia Hanna: Gwill York’s (MBA 1984) parents were determined that their daughter would be practical and self-sufficient. As it turns out, they didn’t have to push too hard. At the age of nine, York started driving her family’s riding mower to earn pocket money. From there on out, she was busy every summer, working at multiple jobs in Cleveland and beyond. York acknowledges her good luck in gaining access to so many different opportunities as a young person. She’s also grateful to HBS for subsidizing a summer internship at a Boston-area hospital, an experience that gave her useful perspective later in her career as cofounder of Lighthouse Capital Partners, a venture capital firm with early investments in a number of health care companies.

Gwill York: I started earning money when I was in fourth grade, and I remember to this day, walking several, several miles to deposit my first earnings and open a checking account, by myself, in fourth grade. So I started doing that and then my parents, especially my dad, but my mom was into it too, made sure I had amazing summer jobs. Clearly there was quite a tailwind behind me and I was given a whole bunch of social capital when it comes to business. After ninth grade, I worked on the floor of a brokerage firm in the trading area. Then I worked for Dr. BJ Diener (HRPBA 1963/MBA 1964/DBA 1974), who was one of the first four women to get her PhD from HBS, and I worked with her on figuring out the cost of closing the Diamond Shamrock factory on Lake Erie.

I also worked with her on Bonnie Bell, which is a cosmetics company, and a marketing plan for this new startup called Leggs, which did pantyhose. Then I worked for International Harvester doing tractor sales and putting it into the first computer on the sales floor, and that was the year before International Harvester went bankrupt. So those are just the things I did before I went to college. And then when I got to business school, the one area I hadn’t known very much about was the health care area, and HBS I think had just put in an income support. If you went and worked for a nonprofit, they gave you more money to make you be at the average of summer earnings between your two years. And I went and worked for New England Medical Center here in Boston and I wrote their first business plan for home health care and tried to help them figure out where their inventory was because it was just stuffed in all kinds of closets. So it was an amazing experience, but I probably wouldn’t have done that if HBS hadn’t had funds to support me so that I could earn money. I couldn’t have predicted that summer job that HBS helped me finance was going to be so important because it gave me immediately some street cred many years later that I’d actually worked in a large hospital system and had worked on changing it and how to sell into hospitals and how unbelievably difficult it is for them to innovate.

JH: After he graduated from HBS In 1960, Peter Crisp (MBA 1960) joined the Rockefeller family’s investment arm. Nine years later, Crisp continued that work by cofounding Venrock Associates, a venture capital firm that made early investments in Apple, Intel, and American Semiconductor. But before all that, Crisp was much like any other college student, looking for adventure in a summer job. He got that and more when he and a fellow student from Yale University headed to the Pacific Northwest to work in a lumber mill. They hoped for fishing on their days off and cool, piney forests. Instead, they ended up in a hot, arid part of Idaho and were given one of the hardest jobs to test their stamina. While he didn’t get to do much fishing, Crisp did earn the respect of fellow mill workers and learned the value of hard labor.

Peter Crisp: It turns out the mill where we were placed was in the middle of a very, very hot area. And we were kind of the Eastern college boys or school boys who were out there. Earning their respect was a challenge and we learned to respect good, hard labor and other people that worked hard. We were called unstackers on the dry chain. When lumber is cut up and it comes down big, long conveyors and the wood is two inches thick, they’re 25 or 30 inches wide, and they’re 30 feet long. Very, very heavy. And there’s a question of how you do it. The first morning on our job, the gloves that we’d bought at the hardware store were worn out, and they gave us mittens that lasted us the rest of the summer and it was how you manipulate a big heavy plank individually to stack ’em in accord with their quality. And it was the meanest job in the lumber mill, and we were put on the toughest assignment to see if we could stand up to it. We had big leather aprons on, and these mittens that were put together with staples, and it was tough. It was tough.

Julia Hanna: When he graduated from HBS in 1970, Gerry Schwartz (MBA 1970) passed up the offers he got to work on Wall Street to join a land development company in Florida. It seemed like a quick, sure path to substantial financial rewards—and it might’ve been—but there was one problem: how the business was run ran completely counter to what he’d learned as a child working alongside his entrepreneurial father in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Traveling to New York as the company’s representative, Schwartz had a moment of reckoning that completely reordered his priorities. Eventually finding his way back to Wall Street, Schwartz returned to his native Canada, and in 1984 founded Onex Corporation, a private equity firm built on the values that changed the trajectory of his life so many years ago.

Gerald Schwartz: I went down to Miami and settled in to go to work. After a while, I realized that I didn’t like the work I was doing. I didn’t like the people I was doing it with very much. And I didn’t like the way they treated the customers. I had always learned with my father that the customer's interest comes first, and take care of the customer, they’ll take care of your business. Anyhow, I was very, very unhappy with what I was doing.

And then I came to New York to do something for the company. and I was registering at the Waldorf in New York. And when I filled in the name of the company, I just said to myself, this is the last time I do this. When I got back to Miami, I quit, and I wanted to pick up where I had left off, I wanted to get a job on Wall Street. And so I called a few people, and I pretty much got the same answer everywhere, which is, “We really liked you, but we’ve already hired the full cohort coming out of this year’s graduation.” And I began to get pretty worried that here I was in Miami, no job, and no easy opening to Wall Street.

I got very lucky. I got a call from the CEO of one of the Wall Street firms that had interviewed me, and he said that he and two or three other of his colleagues at that firm were buying a smaller firm, and was I interested in coming to New York and joining them? And so that got me in a door. So what I learned is pretty straightforward: Don’t do anything in your life that you don’t like doing or be with people you don’t want to associate with, and the only motivation to do it is to make money, to earn more. It was a hard lesson to come by. It came very close to costing me an entire career.

JH: Early in her career, when she was named director of the Illinois State Lottery, Desiree Rogers (MBA 1985) was in the public spotlight, juggling significant responsibilities in operations, management, strategy, and finance. In her new position, Rogers soon recognized the magic that can happen when more established players listen with respect to younger voices in the room, and vice versa. It’s a lesson she took to roles at People’s Energy, the White House, and Johnson Publishing, and one she continues to draw on in her leadership of Black Opal Beauty and Fashion Fair cosmetics, two storied brands for people of color that she purchased in 2019 with Cheryl Mayberry McKissick.

Desiree Rogers: I’m going to say my first real job in my mind, where I really had ultimate responsibility and a big budget and 200 employees and all of this was really the state lottery. And at the state lottery, you are under a microscope because it does have the word “state” in it. There are many people that have their views of gaming, especially at that time in this state. And I think the biggest thing I learned was this combination of what—at the time I was 29—I called “gray hairs” and “young folks.” And I really still feel this way now that I am a “gray hair.” I feel that it’s so important to have multiple voices across races, socioeconomic, and also age at the table. And so part of what we were able to do successfully and have the highest numbers of anyone, even though I really had not run a lottery before or had this kind of position before, is because we had the wise ones at the table, but we also had the new ideas at the table and we demanded mutual respect.

And so if you can take that history of what people knew that maybe had worked there for 20 years, and think about the new ideas that were coming to the table and sort through how they could work in the system, that’s what really got us to the next level.

JH: The energy business got in John Hess’s (MBA 1977) blood early on. As a child, he rode along with his father, Leon, the founder of Hess Corporation, to visit the company’s oil terminals, refineries, and gas stations. In 1995, John Hess succeeded his father as CEO, and led Hess through a strategic transformation from an integrated oil company to one solely focused on exploration and production. Today, Hess continues in that leadership role. It’s a job he loves, he will tell you, because of the people—something he first learned he enjoyed as a teenager, working much further down the line of command.

John Hess: What was my first job? It was when I was, I think about 15, and it was my most fun job. And it was pumping gas at a Hess gas station, because you dealt with all sorts of customers. You were busy every second, filling the car with gasoline—this is before self-serve—washing windshields, popping the hood. You met people from all walks of life, and it was an eyeopener, but it was really fun. And quite frankly, I’d love to do the job again.

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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