My Path to Success

Edward Lewis is the publisher of Essence magazine and the Chairman and CEO of Essence Communications, Inc. An All-City fullback at New York's DeWitt Clinton High School, he attended the University of New Mexico on a football scholarship. Inspired by a sympathetic professor, he earned degrees in political science and international relations before pursuing graduate studies at Harvard Business School. In 1968, Lewis and his partners founded Essence Communications to publish a fashion magazine directed at African American women. The first issue of Essence appeared in 1970, with an initial circulation of 50,000. Lewis became the magazine's publisher, and circulation quickly grew to over a million. Lewis expanded and diversified the parent company with ventures in book publishing, television production, product licensing, and direct-mail marketing, as well as the sister magazines Latina and Jade (for Asian American women) and the annual Essence Awards and Essence Music Festival. In 2000, Essence Communications merged with media giant Time Warner. That same year, Edward Lewis addressed the Academy of Achievement in Scottsdale, Arizona. In this podcast, recorded on that occasion, Edward Lewis discusses his life and career. Recalling the advice and guidance of his mother and father, he shares the values that have informed his business practices.

Abe Pollin (1923 - 2009) was Chairman and CEO of Washington Sports and Entertainment Limited Partnership (WSELP), longtime owner of the Washington Wizards basketball team and the Washington Capitals hockey franchise. A building contractor and real estate developer, as well as a sportsman and philanthropist, he built two state-of-the-art multi-million dollar sports facilities, the Capital Centre, in Landover, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., and the Verizon Centre in the heart of downtown. Washington. Pollin moved to Washington with his family from Philadelphia at the age of eight. After graduating from George Washington University in Washington, he worked for his family's construction business for 12 years, before starting a company of his own. In 1964, Pollin and two partners purchased the Baltimore Bullets basketball team. Four years later, he became the team's sole owner. He moved the Bullets to Washington in 1973 and secured a National Hockey League expansion franchise for Washington. Pollin built the innovative Capital Centre to house the new team; it also became a venue for concerts by the world's most popular entertainers. Pollin renamed his basketball team the Washington Wizards in 1997, reflecting the spirit of the Antiviolence Campaign he had initiated in the Washington area,. With the participation of Wizards and Capitals players, the Anti-Violence Campaign provides conflict resolution programs, educational programs and scholarship opportunities to area students. Despite his success in Landover, it was always Abe Pollin's dream to bring both of his teams to downtown Washington. In 1998, Pollin achieved his long-sought goal with completion of the Verizon Center originally known as the MCI Centre, the $200 million sports and entertainment complex that led the revitalization of downtown Washington. In 1999, Pollin sold the Capitals to AOL executive Ted Leonsis for $200 million, but he retained his interest in the Wizards, becoming the longest-serving owner in the National Basketball Association. In this podcast, recorded a the Academy of Achievement's 1999 Summit in Washington, D.C., Pollin recalls his acquisition of his basketball team, and tells the student delegates that if goal is worth achieving they should persevere, whatever the odds, and never take no for an answer.

Dr. Nathan P. Myhrvold is the former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft and is the co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, which is building a large patent portfolio. He was a precocious student who began college at age 14, and studied mathematics, geophysics, and space physics at UCLA. Myhrvold earned a master's degree in mathematical economics at Princeton, and completed a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics at age 23. Meantime, he taught himself programming and began tinkering with computers. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University working under Professor Stephen Hawking, studying cosmology and quantum field theory. Myhrvold took a leave of absence from Cambridge, and with $10,000 from savings and friends, he moved to Berkeley to start a software company with his brother. In 1986, Microsoft acquired his venture for more than a $1 billion, and three years later, he was selected as their chief "technologist." Dr. Myhrvold worked at Microsoft for 14 years, and founded Microsoft Research in 1991 where he guided the company into the multimedia future, and became one of the most influential leaders in American technology. After Microsoft, he co-founded Intellectual Ventures in 2000, a patent portfolio developer and broker that has acquired over 30,000 patents in the areas of technology and energy. He recently published a cookbook that surveyed the science, technology and techniques used in modern cuisine, "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking." Dr. Nathan Myhrvold participated in the 1999 Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. and spoke to the student delegates about risk-taking, serendipity, his journey as an entrepreneur, and his belief that "life is an adventure."

For 18 years, Alan K. Simpson represented the State of Wyoming in the United States Senate. As Assistant Majority Leader for ten of those years, he was an influential member of the body's Republican leadership. Partisanship aside, he was noted throughout his service for independent thinking, personal integrity and for a dry sense of humor that evaporated pretension on both sides of the aisle. Simpson grew up in Cody, Wyoming, where members of his family have practiced law for over a century. He was admitted to the Wyoming bar in 1958, as briefly served as Assistant Attorney General of the state. For many years, he practiced law in Cody, and served as City Attorney. In 1964, he began a 13-year career in the Wyoming House of Representatives. He was first elected to the United States Senate in 1978. In his three terms in Washington, he favored a conservative approach to fiscal matters and a moderate view of social issues. One of his proudest achievements in the Senate was the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act -- the Simpson-Mazzoli bill -- which combined improved border security with a program for legally hiring temporary guest workers and a means for undocumented workers and their families to pursue legal residence and citizenship. After leaving the Senate in 1997, Senator Simpson became Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He continues to practice law, alongside his two sons, with the family firm in Cody. In 2010, he was appointed by President Obama to lead a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Along with his co-chair, former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, he produced a report that was widely praised for its realistic approach to restructuring the finances of the United States. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1998 Summit in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, shortly after he left Washington, Senator Simpson discusses his family background and his career in public service. He asserts his own belief in a higher authority and urges the Academy's student delegates to be forgiving of themselves and others, and to keep their sense of humor in the face of life's adversities.

The philanthropist, art collector and education advocate Agnes Gund is President Emerita of New York's Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she fell in love with arts as a child and earned a master's degree in art history at Harvard. Beneficiary of a substantial inheritance, she has built an encyclopedic collection of modern and contemporary art, from the 1940s to the present. In 1977, when a budget shortfall forced New York City to cut art classes in its public schools, Gund founded Studio in a School, a non-profit organization that recruits professional artists to lead classes in drawing, printmaking, painting, and sculpture, and works with teachers to link art with other academic subjects. Forty years later, Studio in a School has reached more than 600,000 students in 120 schools throughout the city; an estimated 90 percent of all children who participate in Studio programs come from low-income households. Gund first joined the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, and served as the Museum's President from 1991 to 2002. Over the years, she has donated more than 250 works to the Museum from her own collection, as well as lending and donating pieces to other museums around the United States. In 1997, President Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor given to Americans in the arts. This podcast was recorded the following year, at the Academy of Achievement's 1998 Summit in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Gund tells the Academy's student delegates about the curiosity she felt as a child and her lifelong love of art and learning. She recalls the influence of her art history teachers and her belief in the importance of arts education.

Vice President of the United States from 2001 to 2009, Dick Cheney is considered the most influential vice president in American history. His career at the heart of national policy-making began in the 1970s. At age 34, he was Chief of Staff to President Gerald Ford, the youngest person ever to hold this position. In five terms as Wyoming's sole member of the U.S. House of Representatives, he became one of the body's leading experts on national security issues. He was Deputy Leader of the Republican minority when he was tapped by President George H.W. Bush to serve as Secretary of Defense. At the Pentagon, Cheney oversaw the post-Cold War restructuring of the nation's defenses, reoriented the military to regional rather than global conflicts, and carried out the successful campaign to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the 1990 Gulf War. After leaving government service in 1993, Cheney became CEO of of the construction and oil services company Halliburton. In 2000 he was selected by then-Governor George W. Bush of Texas his running mate on the Republican ticket. With a U.S. Senate equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, Cheney was often called on to cast the tie-breaking vote. Even more important was his role as an adviser on national security policy. He advocated a strenuous response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and was a major proponent of disarming Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. His defense of the Iraq invasion, after intelligence regarding Iraq's arsenal was discredited -- and his advocacy of enhanced interrogation of terror suspects -- made him a lightning rod for criticism of the administration, but not even his harshest critics ever questioned Mr. Cheney's abilities, or his dedication to public service. Over the years, he has surprised supporters and opponents alike with his independent and moderate views on domestic social issues such as gay marriage. Now retired from public life, he remains an influential voice on national security and defense policy. This podcast was recorded at the Academy's 1998 Summit in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, while Mr. Cheney was serving as Chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company.

James (Jim) Goodnight is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SAS Institute Inc., the largest privately-owned software company in the nation. He is the wealthiest person in North Carolina and one of the wealthiest men in the world, with a net worth of $7 billion. The son of a hardware store owner, he moonlighted as a computer programmer while at North Carolina State University. Goodnight "fell in love with computers" in the one computer course he took at NC State in his sophomore year. The following summer he got a job writing programs for the agricultural economics department. A few years later, while working on his master's degree, his curiosity was piqued over the prospect of man being sent to the moon. His programming skills helped him land a position with a company building electronic equipment for the ground stations that would communicate with the Apollo space capsules. He went on to earn his doctorate in statistics at NC State, where he was a member of the faculty from 1972 to 1976. Goodnight developed software for data warehousing, mining and analysis. In 1976, he founded SAS (Statistical Analysis System), and over the years, expanded to business analytics software products now installed in more than 50,000 sites in over 100 countries around the world that generate $1 billion in annual revenues. Goodnight has meantime established a family of 11,000 fiercely loyal employees on a secluded 300-acre wooded campus in Cary, North Carolina, the utopian ideal of the corporate environment. Together with his wife, Ann, he co-founded Cary Academy in 1996, an independent college preparatory day school for students in grades six through 12, with the goal of creating a model school for integrating technology into all facets of education. Jim Goodnight participated in the 1997 Achievement Summit in Baltimore, Maryland and spoke to the student delegates about his personal secrets to success in life and business.

Sam Donaldson first came to the attention of many Americans with his relentless questioning of Presidents Carter, Reagan and Clinton as the longtime White House correspondent for ABC News. Born in El Paso, Texas, he grew up just across the state line in Chamberino, New Mexico. His father died before he was born, leaving his mother and one older brother to run the family's cotton and dairy farm. He became interested in broadcasting at an early age and, after graduating from New Mexico Military institute, majored in telecommunications at Texas Western. He immediately began working at local stations as a disc jockey, announcer and interviewer. At 26, he gave up a secure job on a local station in Dallas, Texas to move to New York and try to break into the big time. Rebuffed in New York, he finally found a job in Washington, D.C. Years of grueling work lay ahead, but in time Donaldson was to become one of the best-known, most-loved and most-hated figures in the world of broadcast news. For over 40 years, he was a pillar of the award-winning ABC News team. Beginning in the 1980s, he served as anchor or co-host of a number of prime time news programs including World News Sunday, Prime Time Live and the Sunday morning political discussion program This Week. Now retired from daily broadcasting, he can still be seen as an occasional panelist on This Week. In this podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1996 Summit in Sun Valley, Idaho, he recounts the story of his early years, and the necessity of persistence in any pursuit.

Tommy Hilfiger is one of the most remarkable success stories in the history of American fashion. Growing up in Elmira, New York in the 1960s, he worked in clothing stores, learning the retail business from the ground up. At age 18, rather than going to college, he started his own business. Driving to New York City, he would buy the fashionable jeans and bell bottom pants available in the city, then customize and re-sell them in the stores of Elmira. With no previous training in fashion design, he began designing and manufacturing his own clothes. Soon he had his own store, the People's Place, which was a hit with the teenagers of Elmira. The opening of a shopping mall in a town nearby hit the Elmira business district hard, and Hilfiger's store declined with the rest of the neighborhood. At 25, his business was bankrupt. Undeterred, he took his wife and young children to New York, where he turned down design jobs with established manufacturers Calvin Klein and Perry Ellis to start his own clothing line. In 1984, he founded the Tommy Hilfiger Corporation, introducing his signature menswear collection. His bright, colorful approach to active, youth-oriented clothing was a hit with shoppers in their teens and twenties, especially in urban areas, and the red white and blue Hilfiger logo became as well known as any clothing label in America. Hilfiger soon added women's and children's lines. The company would eventually include fragrances, bedding and bath products. He took the company public in 1992 and sold it for over a billion dollars in 2006. In 1995, he established the Tommy Hilfiger Corporate Foundation to help empower America's youth. The foundation's philanthropy and education initiatives focus on programs and partnerships that promote educational opportunities for diverse populations in the United States. The following year, Tommy Hilfiger appeared at the Academy of Achievement Summit in Sun Valley, Idaho, where this podcast was recorded. In his talk with the students, he tells how he found his own path to success without formal training. He also discusses the principles that inform his business philosophy.

For 25 years, Larry King was the host of Larry King Live on the CNN cable television network. From an early age, he dreamed of becoming a broadcaster, but found no opportunities in his native New York. At age 23, he took a bus to Miami and found a job sweeping floors at a radio station. His first break came when a disc jockey suddenly quit, and he was asked to replace him. King eventually attracted the attention of larger radio stations, and in 1978 began hosting The Larry King Show, a live nationwide phone-in program. His unique and often controversial style quickly attracted a faithful following of millions. In 1985, he agreed to a similar program for CNN, the first live worldwide phone-in television talk show. Larry King Live became a favorite venue for celebrities and political leaders from around the world and Larry King became one of the most respected and honored personalities in broadcasting.