Being Michael Strahan

This fearsome former New York Giant brings his own style to a
new career at Fox Sports

You never thought he’d do it. For 15 years, Michael Strahan — all 6 feet 5 inches and 255 muscular pounds of him — terrorized opponents as a defensive end with the New York Giants, earning the NFL record along the way for most sacks in a season (22.5, in 2001). And then, this past June, he suddenly announced his retirement. Was he serious, many wondered?

He must have been. Strahan flatly turned down a purported $8 million offer to return to the Giants in August, to fill a hole caused by former teammate Osi Umenyiora’s season-ending injury. “When I made that announcement, I knew I was finished,” he says. “There was no second-guessing.”

What was surprising about Strahan’s decision, of course, was that he and his Giants teammates were coming off an upset win in Super Bowl XLII. So why quit before the next season? Explains Strahan: “You know what? Sometimes you’ve got to know when to fold them. There’s no better way to leave.”

Strahan’s track record in the NFL bears out his belief that if you are working at something, you need to work hard. “It’s easy to look around a football locker room and know who will have a long career and who will falter,” he claims. “All the great players I know spend time working out, studying tapes, taking care of their body and mind. And when there’s a call for them to perform, they make it look easy.” Strahan says he will bring that same work ethic to his new career as a pregame analyst for Fox Sports, joining Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, and Jimmy Johnson in the broadcast booth

“I watch games on every channel, and each commentator brings his own flavor to it,” Strahan says. “Some guys are more serious than others. Some guys are funny. And some are smart. If anybody likes me, it will be because I’m being myself. I’m not going to try to be someone I’m not. I won’t try to pronounce every word perfectly. I’m just going to speak my mind the same way I’ve been doing for years as a player in interviews.”

In that regard, don’t expect Strahan to forget his roots. “I’ll always be a Giants fan,” he promises. “Do you think those guys in the broadcast booth aren’t fans of the teams they played with? Terry Bradshaw is a Steelers fan. Troy Aikman is still a fan of the Cowboys. And if they tell you they’re not, they’re already lying to you. But when you have a broadcasting job, you can’t let being a fan get in the way of your telling the truth.”

As for his ability to absorb the criticism he will inevitably face in the booth, Strahan feels he’s already battle tested. “When you play in New York for 15 years, it’s a tough city. One week you’re great, the next week you’re not, and the next week you’re lukewarm. You have to roll with the punches, not take nothing in the paper personally, and understand the truth about yourself and who you are. Life is too short to stress and worry about things you can’t control.”

Strahan routinely caused stress and worry for opposition quarterbacks during his career, but in conversation he readily laughs at himself. When asked if viewers can expect to see the famous gap between his front teeth fixed for his new TV role, Strahan roars with laughter. “If I’d done that, would you know me if you walked past me on the street? No, man. So if you ever see me with that space filled in, it’s a joke just to make fun of myself. I wouldn’t look right without it.”

Continental is the official airline of the New York Giants.

Working Wonders

for Women

Goldman Sachs is changing the world one woman at a time

Twenty-three third-world women might not seem like a force powerful enough to change the world. But what if they were backed by financial powerhouse Goldman Sachs?

The goal of Goldman Sachs’ recently launched 10,000 Women program is to train female entrepreneurs across the developing world and provide them with skills and a knowledge base to help them change their lives — and perhaps their nations.

The first class — made up of 23 microbusiness owners — enrolled earlier this year in an intensive program at the Pan-African University in Lagos, Nigeria. When they finish their studies, the women will return to their communities, where Goldman expects they will help to plant the seeds that may lead to a wholesale cultural and economic transformation.

“There is a proven multiplier effect to this kind of work,” explains Dina Powell, a managing director and the global head of Goldman Sachs’ office of corporate engagement. Powell helped spearhead the 10,000 Women program. “Each woman we work with can directly impact 50 other women, which creates a matrix of social benefits,” she notes.

Launched this past spring, the 10,000 Women program is backed by a five-year, $100 million grant from Goldman. On the larger scale, participating universities in the developed world — including business schools at Harvard and Columbia — are creating five-week to six-month educational programs for their counterparts in developing countries, such as the American Universities of Cairo and Afghanistan.

The students represent a range of backgrounds and types of businesses. Cynthia Mosunmola Umoru, for instance, is the 28-year-old founder of Honeysuckle PTL Ventures, a small-scale chicken- and snail-breeding business near Lagos. “The program helped me give a proper sense of structure and strategy to my business,” says Umoru, whose enterprise has recently grown to include five full-time employees.

Along with her own staff, Umoru is also working — both online and in person — with many of the other Nigerian women she met through the program. Umoru has access to a dedicated 10,000 Women intranet, which includes a message board that allows her to both seek help and offer advice to her fellow participants. On the ground, Umoru reaches out to this same talent pool to outsource many of her professional needs, such as advertising and promotional materials. And at every step of the way, Umoru can also liaise with perhaps her most important resource, Amy Liu, a London-based vice president in Goldman Sachs’ Investment Management Division who serves as Umoru’s 10,000 Women mentor.

The mentoring component is key: every woman chosen for the program is matched with a Goldman employee who agrees to provide one-on-one support, guidance, and simple encouragement.

The relationship works both ways. For Liu, for instance, becoming a 10,000 Women mentor provided a chance to not only support female economic empowerment but also broaden her own knowledge and expand her skill set. “It took us a while to get on the same page, but soon we were speaking the same business language,” says Liu, who visited with Umoru in Lagos this past summer. “At Goldman we might be producing financial services, and Cynthia creates chickens. But ultimately the same fundamentals are at play.”

Despite the pair’s vast differences in income and education, it’s a relationship that fosters mutual growth, education, and understanding. “I feel like I can have an instant impact on Cynthia’s business, and that’s amazing,” Liu says.

Bright Idea

The inventor behind the light-emitting diode, Nick Holonyak Jr., devised a new way to light up the world

In the February 1963 issue of Reader’s Digest, Nick Holonyak Jr. made a bold prediction — that one day, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) would replace the incandescent lightbulb. “I knew it could happen,” says the inventor of the first visible LED. “I just didn’t know how and when.” Forty-five years later, early adopters are finally switching from compact fluorescent lightbulbs to LED equivalents that can last 4,000 hours longer and use as little as half the energy.

Holonyak, who turns 80 this month, is the inventor most responsible for this technological leap. A professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois, Holonyak was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, in May. The honor serves as an exclamation point on an impressive career that already included awards such as the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology, and more than 30 patents for inventions including the dimmer switch and the laser diode used in CD and DVD players, in addition to the LED.

No lightbulb moment inspired Holonyak to become an inventor, however. Both his parents were immigrants who worked hard just to make ends meet. “Neither of them ever set foot in a classroom,” Holonyak says. “So they valued education.”

During high school, Holonyak worked on the railroad, putting in 10-hour shifts, six days a week. He later enrolled in the University of Illinois, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD, all in electrical engineering. In 1952, while working on his PhD, Holonyak landed a spot in the lab of John Bardeen, the future two-time Nobel Prize winner in physics, and became one of the first engineers to work on semiconductor devices, the precursor to modern-day computers.

In 1961, after rival inventors created LEDs that emitted infrared light, the race was on to develop an LED that gave off light in the visible spectrum. Holonyak was the first to make silicon glow with red light, in 1962, while working at General Electric. And his methods are still in use today. “We’re not throwing in energy and then using some intermediate steps to generate light,” says Holonyak. “We’re putting the current directly into the crystal, and the electrons and the ‘holes’ [essentially, gaps in the electron current] make a quantum process and generate light directly.”

Holonyak returned to academia in 1963 to teach at his alma mater, and he’s still there, conducting research. Over the years, his students have pushed the technology further, making LEDs in colors, shapes, and sizes that Holonyak once only imagined. “They’re making some of the most advanced LEDs out there,” he says. That may be so, but from the bright lights of Beijing to the glitz of the Las Vegas strip, the world wouldn’t be as bright if Holonyak hadn’t lit the way.