Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. (born March 1, 1942 in Mineola, New York) was chairman of the board and chief executive officer of IBM from April 1993 until 2002 when he retired as CEO in March and chairman in December. He is largely credited with turning around IBM's fortunes.

He was formerly CEO of RJR Nabisco, and also held senior positions at American Express and McKinsey & Company. He is a graduate of Chaminade High School, Dartmouth College and holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

In January 2003, he assumed the position of chairman of The Carlyle Group, a global private equity firm located in Washington, DC. He retired from that position in October 2008 and remains a senior advisor to The Carlyle Group.

Gerstner joined American Express in 1978 as the executive vice president of its charge card division. A year later he was named president of the Travel Related Services group, which was responsible for American Express cards, traveler's cheques, and travel-service offices. At this time, MasterCard and Visa had begun to compete for the company's market share. However, Gerstner found new uses for the card and found new users. In 1980 most department stores did not accept American Express cards - Gerstner acted on this and by 1985 retail sales were the second most common use of the card, following airline tickets.^{[citation needed]} College students, physicians, and women were singled out in various marketing pushes. Furthermore, corporations were persuaded to issue cards as a more effective way of tracking business expenses. Gerstner also created cards that appealed to higher end clients, such as the gold card, which carried an annual fee of $65 and offered a $2,000 line of credit, and the platinum card, which had a $250 annual fee, a $10,000 check-cashing benefit, and private club memberships for traveling executives.

Richard Rodriguez (born July 31, 1944) is an American writer who became famous as the author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), a narrative about his intellectual development.

Richard Rodriguez was born on July 31, 1944, into a Mexican immigrant family in San Francisco, California. (Sources also say Sacramento, California.) Rodriguez spoke Spanish until he went to a Catholic school at age six. As a youth in Sacramento, California, he delivered newspapers and worked as a gardener. He graduated from Sacramento's Christian Brothers High School.

Rodriguez received a B.A. from Stanford University, an M.A. from Columbia University, was a Ph.D. candidate in English Renaissance literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and attended the Warburg Institute in London on a Fulbright fellowship. A noted prose stylist, Rodriguez has worked as a teacher, international journalist, and educational consultant and has appeared regularly^{[citation needed]} on PBS's show, NewsHour. A television documentary about Rodriguez's works earned Jim Lehrer a Peabody Award in 1997. Rodriguez’s books include Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1981), a collection of autobiographical essays; Mexico’s Children (1990); Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father (1992), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Brown: The Last Discovery of America. Rodriguez's works have also been published in Harper's Magazine, Mother Jones, and Time.