:Where Worklife Matters

If you haven’t heard of Stephen A. Schwarzman, you must have been hiding below a rock for the last few years. Last year Stephen was no. fifty-three on the list of the most well-to-do individuals in America, all the same it’s not just money which makes this story interesting but his astounding rise to power in the financial industry and his patronage of the arts. The Blackstone Group co-founder is a marvelous role model and further proof that success in life may be gained by hard work and being unequivocally dedicated to your career.

Stephen Schwarzman and Peter Peterson founded the private-equity management and financial advisory company Blackstone Group in the eighties. In recent years, it has become a world leader in M&A, but note that Stephen did not establish his own enterprise immediately.

Stephen spent his childhood in the state of Pennslyvania. After high school he decided on an undergraduate program at the famed Yale University in Connecticut. He then opted for a master’s degree in business at the renowned Harvard Business school in Cambridge, MA. Afterwards he became part of the corporate team at Lehman Brothers investment bank. By the unusually young age of 31, he had been appointed one of their managing directors. Stephen doesn’t simply offer his time to a variety of not-for-profit organizations, but he has also been a non-faculty professor at Yale. Moreover, he is Chairman to the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in New York, New York. On top of all that, he told the American public on March 11th, 2008 that he had gifted $100 million to the New York Public Library to help fund their expansion. In fact the library called their new extension the “Stephen A. Schwarzman Building” to commemorate his lavish contribution. Stephen Schwarzman is a role model to a new generation of business people: As one of Times Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, Stephen is these days widely followed by the media and influencing economic development all over the globe. His mastery of the business community has been miraculous, not to mention the fact that his lavish support of music and the liberal arts has been an encouragement to the business community at large. So the world awaits Stephen’s next move. To sum up, Stephen is a person who has taken the best advantage of each business opportunity given to him and he has also made exemplary use of his status as a means to improve the lives of his countrymen.