Don M. Wilson T'73
When Don Wilson retired from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. in 2006, he offered his colleagues a list of "verities in risk management." They were precepts such as "hubris is destructive," "complex risk is best described with plain language," "objective advice to our clients means that sound judgment and measured restraint are more important than profitability," and "liquidity is abundant until it is not."
Refreshing words these days, when master-of- the-universe arrogance and financial crisis dominate the news. As the firm's first chief risk officer from 2003 to 2006, Wilson helped steer the bank to its enviable position today—"the last bank standing," as Fortune has put it. Yet Wilson does not vaunt. "I am gratified," he says simply, "to have been part of a business that is respected for its discipline, its diversification, and its durability."
His probity and common sense bear the imprint of a small-town upbringing in Ravenna, Ohio. The eldest of five sons of a real estatedeveloper father and school-teacher mother, Wilson had not visited the East Coast until he entered Harvard as a freshman, at the urging of his high school English teacher. He graduated cum laude in 1970 and headed to Hanover for a joint MD/MBA degree at Dartmouth Medical School and Tuck. But, wary of the time and money involved, he graduated only from Tuck in 1973.
Soon thereafter, he joined Chemical Bank in New York and stayed with the firm through 33 years of merging and name changing. He smiles as he recalls that his Japanese friends call him "an old-fashioned American. 'You have had only one job and one wife,' they say."
During his career, Wilson managed corporate finance activities and large capital markets businesses, often as a troubleshooter. In the 1970s, he put together large, complicated financings for Fortune 500 companies in an era before specialization. "You did everything in a transaction yourself," he says. After a threeyear assignment fixing a corporate banking operation in California, he moved to Tokyo to head Chemical Bank's East Asia businesses at a time of rapid deregulation. In the late 1980s, he moved to London to lead the bank's activities in Europe.
From 1991 to 2000, Wilson headed the Global Trading Division in New York, a market leader in currency and interest rate products and an important profit source after Chemical's combination with Manufacturers Hanover Trust in 1992 and Chase Manhattan in 1996.
After the acquisition of J.P. Morgan & Co. in 2000, Wilson was co-head of the Credit and Rates Division, which managed wholesale currency, derivative, bond, loan syndication, emerging market, and structured products activities worldwide. In his final assignment, as chief risk officer, Wilson was responsible for credit, equity, market, and operating risk globally.
Since retirement, Wilson has enjoyed more time with his wife, Lynn, and their three teenage children. For several years he has been chairman of Tuck Annual Giving and vice chairman of Annual Leadership Giving at the Harvard College Fund. "I was the beneficiary of scholarships at both institutions, so now is a time for reciprocity," he says. The Wilson Family Scholarship at Tuck is awarded with preference given to students in the joint MD/MBA program.
Now on the boards of the Bank of Montreal and several nonprofits, Wilson has also found time to look back. He has recently published a history of his hometown and a remembrance anthology of poems by Bernice Douglass, the teacher who changed his life by pointing him toward Harvard. He has also published two golf history books, and a second book on his hometown is forthcoming.