Tag: HBS

Steve Cotler in Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin

For fairly obvious reasons, Harvard Business School keeps very good track of and contact with its alumni. One of the best things they do is their magazine, HBS Alumni Bulletin. Some of the articles are interesting, okay, uh-huh, but the real reason alumni turn this mag’s pages is the Class Notes. Every class that still has a living member has someone who actively solicits personal stories about those individuals. Much of the blather is routine stuff: “My wife sits on the hospital board. I golf whenever I can. And the kids are struggling to make ends meet in NYC on traders’ salaries.”

I skim those entries, looking for the unusual. Like this in the September 2011 issue from Continue reading “Steve Cotler in Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin”

Sheiks on a Plane

Ali Balak QatlarSatif Luwi Qatlar_2On a balmy Saturday morning in late-1978, two 30-something brothers boarded a Pacific Southwest Airlines flight in Los Angeles. As they walked up the outdoor stairway into the PSA jet, the two men looked suspiciously like Arab terrorists during a time when Arab terrorism was non-existent. They were traveling under their real names, but to almost any observer they could have been Ali Balak Qatlar and Satif Luwi Qatlar. The former looked deranged, the latter somewhat simple.

Their destination was Oakland, where they would be met by their widowed 61-year old mother. She had decided Continue reading “Sheiks on a Plane”