“He brings real life to his students,” one colleague has said. And what a life it has been. From the south side of Chicago to Williams to Harvard Business School to Bain and Company to ownership of several companies to Clinical Professor of Finance and Management at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Despite, or perhaps because of, your reputation for toughness in the classroom, you have repeatedly been named Outstanding Professor of the Year by students who believe they have learned in your oversubscribed classes how one day to better run their own companies. Business Week named you one of the top professors of entrepreneurship in America and one of fourteen “New Stars of Finance.” Ernst and Young selected you as “Entrepreneur of the Year.” Your deepest commitment, though, is to developing new entrepreneurs within America’s minority populations. As Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Kautiman Foundation you use business development as a tool to help people become self-sufficient and build healthy communities. You helped found The Runners’ Club, which uses training, mentoring, and access to capital to increase the number of large-scale African- American-owned companies across the country. In all of this work you stress “real world” solutions over theories as a way to increase opportunities and bright futures not only for African Americans but for all with enough determination to follow your own striking example.