BOSTON– Harvard Enterprise College (HBS) right now conferred its most necessary honor, the Alumni Achievement Award, on 5 distinguished graduates. Included as a part of the College’s Graduation ceremony, the award highlights examples of excellent management for HBS’s graduating college students.


This 12 months’s award recipients are Patricia C. “Tosh” Barron (MBA 1972), former president of each engineering methods and the workplace merchandise division of Xerox; Salman A. Khan (MBA 2003), founder and chief government officer of Khan Academy; Naina Lal Kidwai (MBA 1982), former government director of HSBC Asia Pacific, former chairman of HSBC India, and founder and chairman of the India Sanitation Coalition; Robert L. Ryan (MBA 1970), retired senior vp and chief monetary officer of Medtronic; and Robert B. Wilson (MBA 1961, DBA 1963), the Adams Distinguished Professor of Administration, Emeritus, at Stanford College and winner of the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Financial Sciences for enhancements to public sale idea and the invention of latest public sale codecs.
All through their careers, these exceptional graduates have contributed considerably to their organizations and communities whereas upholding the very best requirements and values in all the things they do. As such, they characterize the perfect of the College’s alumni and are function fashions for all who aspire to have an effect on each enterprise and society.
This 12 months’s recipients of the College’s highest honor exhibit how household, luck, and a wholesome urge for food for danger can form a life.


Tosh Barron (MBA 1972) has had an extended profession of enterprise management. She spent six years at McKinsey and Firm, as a guide within the operations follow, specializing in international technique and operations enchancment for manufacturing and repair firms. Barron then joined Xerox Company, the place her first function as supervisor of multinational tasks concerned main the corporate’s entry into the Chinese language market. She had a 21-year profession on the firm, retiring in 1999. As a company officer, she held the positions of president of the $600 million Xerox engineering division and president and CIO of the $8 billion workplace merchandise division. She beforehand was an executive-in-residence and medical affiliate professor on the Stern College of Enterprise, New York College, instructing MBA programs in management and company governance. Tosh has served as lead director and chair of the Governance Committee of Teleflex Company; vice chair of the board of USAA; and lead director of Quaker Chemical Company. Further board service consists of Aramark Company, Frontier Company, Ultralife Company (chair of the board), and Reynolds Metals Company.
Reflecting on her many years in senior government roles and as a lead director on quite a few company and nonprofit boards, Barron stated, “In management, I believe an important factor is to pay attention; the opposite is to be decisive. You’re not the one one with a mind, so it’s crucial to get enter. And you’ll’t waffle.”


Salman Khan (MBA 2003) is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit group based in 2008 with a easy mission: to offer a free, world-class training to anybody, anyplace. The net training enterprise grew out of Khan’s expertise tutoring his younger cousin in math whereas speaking by cellphone and utilizing an interactive notepad. He created software program to offer follow issues and suggestions and posted movies of his hand-scribbled tutorials on YouTube. When an viewers for the movies took off in 2009, he give up his job as a hedge fund analyst to commit himself full time to Khan Academy. As we speak, greater than 135 million registered customers all over the world use Khan Academy throughout 190 international locations and 50 languages. College students flip to the free website to study math, science and the humanities. In the US, Khan Academy is working with greater than 280 faculty districts to help lecturers and supply district-level insights to directors.
Speaking concerning the impression of digital instruments on studying, Khan stated, “In mastery studying, a scholar strikes at his or her personal tempo and takes as many photographs on objective as wanted to grasp an idea, earlier than advancing. If I’m one instructor with 30 youngsters, it’s very onerous to tug this off; however you probably have software program instruments and on-demand video, it’s doable.”


Naina Lal Kidwai (MBA 1982) started her profession in funding banking in 1982 at British-owned Grindlays Financial institution in India and rose to move it in 1987—the primary girl to move an funding financial institution in India. She later switched from funding banking to retail banking as head of non-resident Indian providers. In 1994 she moved to Morgan Stanley, the place as head of funding banking she returned to working within the capital markets and mergers and acquisitions. In 2002 she moved to HSBC India to move their funding banking and capital markets enterprise, and shortly after took over as CEO of the financial institution. Ultimately she turned chairperson of the financial institution’s India operations and government director on the board of HSBC Asia Pacific. In 2013 she was elected president of the Federation of Chambers of Indian Business—the primary girl to move the group in its 86-year-history.
“The wonderful thing about working in finance in India on the time was the chance to affect the evolution of the nation’s monetary establishments and regulatory buildings,” Kidwai stated of returning to India at a time when the sector was present process dramatic change. “Very early on, I used to be a part of the group that helped arrange a second, extra trendy inventory alternate and developed the primary insurance policies on fairness points and insider buying and selling.”
Upon her retirement from HSBC in 2015, Kidwai established the India Sanitation Coalition, a corporation that unites company, nonprofit, monetary, and authorities stakeholders in a nationwide effort to enhance the well being of residents and cut back illness by ending open defecation, treating sewage, and re-using handled waste water.


Robert Ryan (MBA 1970), the 2022 HBS Class Day Speaker, is a enterprise chief with an extended, profitable, industry-spanning profession. Previous to becoming a member of Medtronic, he served as chief monetary officer for the Union Texas Petroleum Company for ten years, overseeing the corporate’s preliminary public providing. Earlier roles embody stints at McKinsey and Citibank, the place as vp he was liable for overseeing relationships with firms within the nascent cable tv {industry}. He’s a former board member of organizations together with Normal Mills, Hewlett-Packard, Stanley Black & Decker, and UnitedHealth, along with serving as a trustee emeritus of Cornell College, the place he holds a grasp’s diploma in electrical engineering. Ryan, a Detroit native and longstanding philanthropic supporter of training—significantly for these from underserved backgrounds—was honored by the HBS African American Scholar Union in 2000. In 2004 he launched the Robert L. Ryan Fellowship at HBS, which has supported 22 college students since its inception.
On his resolution to use to HBS, Ryan defined, “I used to be practically two years right into a PhD in electrical engineering once I realized I used to be on autopilot. I stated, ‘There’s extra to life than having a assured job for all times.’ I’d at all times been intrigued by finance, and didn’t need to look again and remorse not profiting from that second, so I utilized to HBS.”


Robert Wilson (MBA 1961, DBA 1963) has been on the school at Stanford’s Graduate College of Enterprise since 1964 and has revealed roughly 100 articles in skilled journals and books since incomes his bachelor’s, grasp’s, and doctoral levels at Harvard Faculty and HBS. He’s thought of an knowledgeable on sport idea and its purposes and has authored among the primary research of reputational results in predatory pricing, worth wars, and different aggressive battles. Along with his Nobel Prize, his e book on nonlinear pricing received the 1995 Leo Melamed Prize, awarded biannually by the College of Chicago for “excellent scholarship by a enterprise professor.” He’s an elected member of the Nationwide Academy of Sciences, and a fellow, former officer and council member of the Econometric Society. At numerous instances in his profession he has suggested the US Division of the Inside, the Electrical Energy Analysis Institute, and the Xerox Palo Alto Analysis Middle.
“There have been a number of instances once I’ve labored on an issue alone and it’s been a catastrophe,” Wilson stated when discussing the worth of collaboration. “I rely upon an alternate of concepts with somebody who’s extra exact and rigorous as a result of I are typically a considerably imprecise, speculative thinker.”
Extra detailed info on every of the recipients follows and may be discovered on the School’s awards website.
The Alumni Achievement Award is given yearly to a small, choose group of alumni who characterize the perfect traditions and highest aspirations of the College. For greater than 50 years, HBS has honored people whose strategic imaginative and prescient drives their work, whose creativity and innovation encourage these round them, whose character and values are exemplary, and whose management—of their careers and communities—is an instance for others to observe. They really are leaders who make a distinction on the planet.