At its 55^th Annual Leadership Dinner in May, the HBS Club of New York (HBSCNY) honored four leaders whose careers and contributions to the world embody this year’s theme, “Challenging the Status Quo.”

The honors and honorees were: the Lifetime Achievement Award, given to The Honorable W. Mitt Romney (MBA 1974/JD 1975), United States Senator; the Entrepreneurship Award, given to Ilana D. Weinstein (MBA 1995), founder and CEO of The IDW Group LLC; the John C. Whitehead Social Enterprise Award, given to Denise M. Murrell (MBA 1980), Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large, Office of the Director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Business Leadership Award, given to Clara Wu Tsai (MBA 1993), vice chair of BSE Global and owner of the New York Liberty and Brooklyn Nets.

More than 400 alumni and guests attended the sold-out dinner at The Pierre hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The annual Leadership Dinner, the club’s primary fundraiser, raised over $1.25 million this year. All proceeds go toward the club’s high-impact programs, including pro-bono consulting through Community Partners, workforce development through the Skills Gap Initiative, entrepreneurship through the regional Alumni New Venture Competition and HBS Alumni Angels of Greater New York, and a broad array of programming open to both alumni and the general public. Funds also support scholarships to attend the MBA and Executive Education programs at HBS, as well as summer fellowships, and benefit the club’s newly-established task forces to focus on current critical issues facing business and society, including racial equity and antisemitism.

“It was an honor and privilege to be this year’s Dinner Chair,” says Ann Sarnoff (MBA 1987), former chair and CEO of Warner Bros. “I believe deeply in the club’s mission of serving the New York City community. This year’s theme, ‘Challenging the Status Quo,’ was a way to recognize leadership in difficult times, something that all of our honorees helped to punctuate.”

Apart from the rare Lifetime Achievement Award, Sarnoff notes that this year for the first time, all three leadership honorees were women. “All three women are remarkable and are changing the game in their respective industries. They were excited to be honored because the awards recognize their many accomplishments as well as the leadership qualities that we are taught at HBS.”

Sarnoff adds that the people who introduced the honorees are also noteworthy leaders in their respective fields. “They did a great job shining a light on the remarkable accomplishments of each of our honorees.

The Entrepreneurship Award honoree, Ilana Weinstein, is founder and CEO of The IDW Group LLC, a New York-based executive search firm focused on placing senior hedge fund and business professionals across the investment landscape. The firm is the leading boutique for hedge fund managers, asset managers, private equity firms, and family offices in search of top investment talent for their public and global investment initiatives. It was the subject of a 2023 Harvard Business School case study published in honor of its 20th Anniversary, and The Wall Street Journal has called Weinstein “one of the most powerful women in hedge funds.”

Weinstein was introduced by Steven A. Cohen, owner of the New York Mets and founder of Point72 Asset Management.

“In receiving this award I thought about what entrepreneurship means. I think the definition is broader than starting a company or a business,” says Weinstein. “It cuts to the quick of who we are as individuals, what we stand for, and having the guts to chart our own course in life, even if that’s uncomfortable. Even if it flies in the face of what others are doing. Even if it’s just easier to stay on the path we are on.”

Denise Murrell, who received the John C. Whitehead Social Enterprise Award, joined The Metropolitan Museum of Art in January 2020 as Associate Curator for Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art. Dr. Murrell has taught art history at Columbia University in New York and in Paris. She has published and lectured extensively on nineteenth and twentieth century modernism and global contemporary art in the US and internationally. Murrell was introduced by Darren Walker, OBE, President of the Ford Foundation.

The Business Leadership Award honoree, Clara Wu Tsai, is a businesswoman, investor, and philanthropist. She is governor and an owner of the WNBA’s New York Liberty and an owner of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets. As vice chair of BSE Global, the teams’ parent company, she oversees all matters relating to fan development, civic and community engagement, and the role Barclays Center plays within Brooklyn. As founder of the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation, Wu Tsai pursues philanthropic investments across the arts, science, and social justice spaces. She established the Social Justice Fund in 2020 to work toward economic mobility and racial justice in Brooklyn. She is a founding partner of the REFORM Alliance, which seeks to reform the criminal justice system. The Foundation also supports the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University and the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University for understanding human cognition. She was introduced by Mark Tatum (MBA 1998), Deputy Commissioner and COO of the National Basketball Association.

For only the third time in its history, the club gave out the Lifetime Achievement Award, this time to Mitt Romney, current US Senator from Utah and former Governor of Massachusetts (2003-2007). Romney has earned a reputation for reaching across the aisle to advance major priorities that benefit Utah and people across the country, and as a leading voice on U.S. foreign policy and national security. Romney also led the 2002 Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the Winter Olympics and became the Republican nominee for president in 2012. Before entering public service, he led a successful business career as the cofounder of Bain Capital, a leading investment company, and as the turnaround CEO of Bain & Company, an international management consulting firm.

Romney was introduced by Stephen Schwarzman (MBA 1972), Chairman, CEO and Cofounder of The Blackstone Group.

For an event as monumental and impactful as the Leadership Dinner, the HBSCNY relies on a team of volunteer members who bring their varied management and organizational expertise to bear on what is a year-long effort.

This year’s Leadership Dinner Committee Co-Chairs Tamara Bowens (MBA 2001) and Joanna Stone (MBA 1997), worked closely with previous long time Chairs Bruce Marcus (MBA 1980), and Amy Vecchione (MBA 1984) to bring the event to fruition.

“I jumped at the chance to co-chair HBSCNY’s signature event,” says Stone. “It was gratifying that the event brought the Harvard Business School community together to remind us what moral courage and moral clarity around leadership is. We’ve only given the Lifetime Achievement Award three times, and Mitt Romney was the obvious choice. This award is something we reserve for leaders of exceptional quality, principle and experience. Senator Romney has exemplified the leadership and excellence we learned about and aspired to achieve at HBS.”

Stone says Romney’s co-authoring of an open letter to Harvard last fall, challenging the school’s response to a rise in antisemitism on campus, made him a stand-out candidate for the award. “It brought together the HBS community in a way that made us proud, that made us hopeful,” she says. “I felt, as the co-chair, that we needed to make a statement that our community admires and honors leaders who care, and who are trying to make the world a better place.”

Clare E. Peeters (MBA 2000),outgoing president of the HBSCNY, says the dinner not only raises critical funding for all of its activities, it raises the clubs’ profile in the larger New York community, which attracts new members, more volunteers and more potential nonprofits to serve.

“It really ends up being a fantastic thing,” says Peeters, who presided over the dinner alongside HBSCNY Board Chair Deborah A. Farrington (MBA 1976). “The exposure for the club, for the School, and for the work that the club does to support the community is outstanding and would be difficult to accomplish in any other way. And, it was just incredibly fun. The room was full, the audience was abuzz, the speeches were terrific. So it was inspiring and uplifting and I was thrilled to have it unfold that way given that it was the final dinner during my term as club president.”

She adds that this was the first time all of the leadership roles for the event—the Dinner Chair, Board Chair, Club President, and Committee Co-Chairs—in addition to the three honorees, were all women. “That, in of itself, was pretty unique and exciting.”

While the HBSCNY is an independent club, its connection and engagement with HBS is very strong, say Bruce Marcus and Amy Vecchione, longtime past Dinner Chairs who worked behind the scenes with a committee of 16 volunteers to bring this event to fruition.

“It’s very important to us that we make sure that HBS is very involved in what we’re doing as we go throughout the year, and that we put on an event that HBS would be proud of,” says Marcus. “What we do here in New York, and especially with this dinner, is absolutely one leg of the stool of long-term alumni engagement with HBS.”

Vecchione says HBS always sends a contingent of administrators to attend the dinner. Senior Associate Dean Fritz Foley attended the dinner for the first time, and offered the School’s congratulations to the honorees for their remarkable accomplishments. He also noted the critical role the HBSCNY plays in sustaining HBS community connections both for recent and longtime alumni.

“It was just a really nice evening to come out to support an organization that’s doing good things for the city and the School. And spend some time with people that you maybe don’t see that often and get inspired,” adds Vecchione. “I feel a lot of satisfaction that, not only did we have a great dinner, but I think it helped our New York HBS community. We really needed this.”

The HBS PRIDE Alumni Association, in partnership with the HBS PRIDE student organization, recently held its annual panel discussion, “The LGBTQ+ Experience at HBS: Cross Generational Perspectives.” The panel featured seven alumni representing five decades of MBA classes: Meri Bond (MBA 1981), Alan Miles (MBA 1992), Brenna Rauw (MBA 2004), Robert Lennox (MBA 2011), Jashin Lin (MBA 2023), Kathy Halley (MBA 1999), and Willis Emmons (MBA 1985) who is also Senior Lecturer and Director of the C. Roland Christensen Center for Teaching at HBS.

An audience of 50 students, alumni, and staff attended the on-campus discussion on April 18, while another 50 alumni tuned in via livestream.

“People get to tell their stories, talk about their HBS journeys,” says Paul Donaher (MBA 1981), co-president of the HBS PRIDE Alumni Association. “What they say runs the gamut from surprising to humorous to really poignant. And students in the audience can ask questions and also share their LGBTQ+ experiences at HBS.”

Donaher says this is the fourth year that the HBS PRIDE Alumni Association has presented the panel, which launched at the request of current HBS students who were looking to connect around the LGBTQ+ experience at HBS and get a broader sense of what has changed over the decades.

“Everybody on the panel recounted very personal experiences,” he says. “They talked about their time on campus but also about being out in the work world and about how they’re managing that with varying degrees of success. They had very compelling stories. We had a student from the audience pose a question that made it clear that she and her partner had recently had a negative encounter with another student about their sexuality. You might expect that many years ago. But, I would think that kind of thing would be over with. So, it was a little bit shocking to me, personally. I think other people felt the same way.”

Still, Donaher says the discussion was generally very encouraging.

“I think, as the saying goes, the arc of history bends towards justice,” he says. “It doesn’t mean it’s a fully linear progression, but I do think that certainly the on-campus experience now is generally quite different than it was a long time ago.”

In 1981, when Donaher was at HBS, the School did not officially recognize a gay and lesbian student organization, though one did exist. The group, known as Alternative Executive Lifestyles, had only about 10 or 15 members, and had to meet off-campus.

“But this year, I think there’s something like 170 members in the HBS Pride Student Organization,” he says. “And now the HBS PRIDE Alumni Association has around 800 members globally.”

That number speaks to the fact that since many older LGBTQ+ students were not out while at HBS, they may still lack awareness that they can affiliate with the HBS PRIDE Alumni Association. “But the people that are graduating from HBS now—they just automatically sign on to be members of Alumni PRIDE, because that’s where their friends are,” says Donaher. “And they want to continue to connect.”

He adds that LGBTQ+ progress on campus is helped by having faculty who are out and visible to students. “Willis Emmons did our first panel and volunteered to come back this year. It’s really helpful for the students to hear the perspective of a faculty member.”

Donaher says he was also encouraged to notice a number of allies among the audience, and the club hopes to find more ways to attract allies to future events.

To learn more, visit the HBS PRIDE Alumni Association.

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