Robert Steven Kaplan may be the equivalent of a fill-in head coach who takes his team to the Super Bowl and wins.
A professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, Kaplan is also a former vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
From November 2007 to June 30 of this year, he served as acting president and CEO of Harvard Management Co., the company in charge of Harvard University’s endowment.
He filled in during the period between the departure of Mohamed El-Erian and the arrival on July 1 of Jane Mendillo, the company’s new president and CEO.
On Friday, the university announced that the endowment achieved an 8.6 percent gain and grew to $36.9 billion in the fiscal year ending June 30, a year in which Kaplan led the company for eight months.
While the returns were down from 23 percent in the previous fiscal year, they represented a significant achievement given the current economic times.
“During this period of extreme market volatility, the staff at HMC has performed at an extraordinarily high level,” Kaplan said in a prepared statement.
Harvard’s endowment is the largest of any university in the nation.
Yale University, the second richest school, had an endowment of $22.5 billion at the end of the 2007 fiscal year. It has not reported its fiscal 2008 results.
Kaplan came to the Harvard Business School in September 2005. His retirement from Goldman Sachs after a 22-year career there became official in January 2006.
He had been the vice chairman in charge of investment banking at Goldman, and he remains a senior director of the company.
Kaplan joined Goldman in 1983 after graduating from Harvard Business School. He became a partner in 1990.
Kaplan received $17.5 million from Goldman in 2004, including $600,000 in salary, a $9 million cash bonus and $7.9 million in stock.
He’s one of many successful and influential Goldman alumni.
Henry M. Paulson Jr., the secretary of the Treasury, had been Goldman’s chairman and CEO before leaving for his government post.
Jon Corzine, the governor of New Jersey and a former United States senator, also served as Goldman’s chairman and CEO.
Of late, Goldman Sachs has distinguished itself by doing well despite the crisis in the markets. It reports its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday. Analysts expect so-so profits, which right now may not be that bad.
Mendillo, the new endowment leader at Harvard, told The Wall Street Journal that, because of the unpredictable markets, she and her staff are “cautious about returns” on their endowment “for the next few years.”
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