Greg Young ’26

Following 20-plus years as a partner in “Big Law,” I was recruited into a single-family office in 2018. As a senior executive and fiduciary, I spend my days managing the investment, financial, legal, and other business and personal needs for multiple generations of one family. I also have oversight of the family’s foundation and endowment. It’s really rewarding work, and it feels like a natural culmination of the skills, experiences, and learning I accumulated over the arc of my legal career: building client relationships, negotiating transactions and running engagements, managing and leading colleagues and client teams, and helping run a law firm.

My pivot from law to a single-family office sparked my interest in a return to business school. I hoped that an academically rigorous program would add depth and breadth to my investment and financial acumen. My time in the EMBA program has been super, and the asset management track at SOM has delivered exactly what I was hoping for. The experience has reinforced areas of prior exposure and pushed me much deeper in so many others—setting me up extremely well for the last third of my professional career.

Courses like Sourcing and Managing Funds, Corporate Finance, Competitive Strategy, and Investing in Alternative Assets have been especially useful. My classmates and I have used company and industry reporting to better understand and assess how firms position and present themselves strategically to create value for stakeholders. All of that directly applies to what I do throughout my week.

A leadership class provided an opportunity for a 360-degree review from family, work colleagues, and SOM peers. That process reaffirmed areas where growth would strengthen important leadership capabilities. Owning these areas is critical, and the program has provided a chance to do so in an authentic setting, with a fabulous learning team and cohort, but separate from my professional work and engagements.

My learning team assignments and experiences have been outstanding, and our accomplished cohort is diverse in many ways, including professional experiences. We are similarly focused in our desire to learn from and support each other. As we head into our last semester, my learning team partners and I have been discussing how best we can crystallize this experience and carry what we’ve learned forward into our lives.

Returning to school has revitalized my desire to learn, required me to be vulnerable, and helped me to realize that I can—and want to—create opportunities for others. When I think about the kind of person and leader I aspire to be, a verse from the Tao Te Ching comes to mind: “These possessions I choose and cherish: to care, to be fair, to be humble. When a man cares he is unafraid; when he is fair he leaves enough for others; when he is humble he can grow.”