Though the volatile, difficult economic landscape formed a backdrop to the celebrations, Jamie Chang, M.B.A. ’10, the informal master of ceremonies for the Harvard Business School Class Day ceremony, injected a lighthearted note in his unmistakable Australian accent, referring to himself as the “token Asian-Australian diversity admission.” Two other graduating students, Patrick Chun and Scott Daubin, shared the HBS Student Association Presidents’ Address, noting that the 907 members of the class, which came from 71 countries and 68 industries, nonetheless had commonalities: “The class will share a special bond due to the unprecedented financial upheaval during our time at Harvard Business School.” They said that classmates had been interviewing for jobs in nontraditional sectors, such as government, education, and nonprofits.
Student speaker John Coleman, M.B.A. ’10, opened with some acknowledgements, including one to those in the student loan office: “I owe you so, so much!” Citing Joseph Schumpeter’s vision of capitalism as “creative destruction,” Coleman called on the graduates to recapture the imaginative powers of childhood and combine them with an adult’s dedication. Returning to the theme of the worldwide financial crisis, he said, “Our two years here have been a season of destruction,” and reminded his classmates, “M.B.A.s like us are sensitive to the crisis, because we’ve borne at least some share of the blame.”
The Class Day Distinguished Speaker, Sir Ronald Cohen, M.B.A. ’69, is one of the world’s leading private-equity investors and a creator of the private-equity industry in Europe as founding partner and former chairman of Apax Partners. He is also a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers. After stepping down as CEO of Apax, Cohen devoted himself to developing private-sector, commercial solutions to problems of social deprivation in Great Britain and conflict in the Middle East.
Cohen declared that there was “something in the air” when he received his M.B.A., in a time when graduates coveted jobs with big corporations like U.S. Steel and Kodak, firms that have since tumbled far down the Fortune 1000 list. In 2010, he said, something is again in the air, citing a statistic that shows “20 percent of you [M.B.A. recipients] following social enterprise courses.” Cohen recommended that trained managers try social enterprise; he said that the same skills they had learned at Harvard could work on social issues as well as commercial ones. Cohen cited the example of his own Bridges Ventures in England, which has invested $250 million in an endeavor to prove that by funding enterprises in the lowest 25 percent of the economic strata, they could produce results half as good as standard venture-capital work. “People don’t want charity, they want a chance,” he declared. He explained the need for social-investment banks, and described how a “social-impact bond” could benefit the government by reducing the rate of recidivism among released juvenile prisoners. With “governments under a cash constraint, they understand the limits of what they can do,” he said. That, indeed, may be what is in the air.
