William H. Wright II

William H. Wright II is a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and the Firm’s first Global Head of Mobility. In this role, Bill engages in regular dialogue with Regional and Business Unit leaders and Talent Officers to help track the Firm’s progress toward meeting its needs for strategic moves and to identify the pool of candidates to be considered for redeployment.

Mobility will be the key to develop leaders with a global perspective while also building the Firm’s global DNA, thereby ensuring consistency in the delivery of the Firm and its services to clients throughout the world with respect to commercial, cultural and regulatory and compliance issues of the various regions.

Bill joined the firm in 1982. During his career, in Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley, he has been Head of the Corporate Finance Execution group, where he was responsible for leading and coordinating teams in the execution of complex equity offerings for multinational corporations including the 1999 $5.5 billion initial public offering of United Parcel Service (UPS), the 1998 privatization by the U. S. government of its uranium enrichment business, USEC, Inc. and numerous privatizations of state-owned enterprises of the Republic of France including Renault and Rhone-Poulenc. He served for two years as Worldwide Director of the Firm’s Financial Analyst Program. Mr. Wright is also a Trustee of the Morgan Stanley Foundation.

He received a master’s in business administration from the Darden School of the University of Virginia in 1987 where he was named the Thomas I. Storrs Fellow (for leadership, scholarship and humanitarianism), received the C. Stewart Sheppard Award (for public service), and was elected to University Raven Honor Society.

Mr. Wright has been consulted by the Securities and Exchange Commission Division of Corporation Finance and the U. S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services with respect to securities regulation reform. He has served on the faculties of the Ray Garrett Institute of the Northwestern University School of Law and the Practising Law Institute. He has also been a panelist at the American Bar Association’s Business Law Section.

Mr. Wright has been involved with Yale since his graduation. He was chairman of the reunion gift committees for his tenth, fifteenth and twenty-fifth reunions, receiving the Alumni Fund Chairman’s Award in 1992 for setting the record for a tenth reunion gift. In 1993, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the Yale Alumni fund where he served until 2001. During his time, he regularly returned to campus to give the keynote speech to launch the Senior Class Gift Campaign. In 2001, Mr. Wright was appointed to the University Council. He also serves on the Campaign Executive Committee, and is a Sterling Fellow. He was elected to a two-year term as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Alumni Fund in 2004. Mr. Wright is Chairman of the University Librarian’s Development Council and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. He is also an Associate Fellow of Morse College.

Within his community, Mr. Wright is Senior Warden of the Vestry of St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue. He is also a member of the board of Continuum Health Partners and its four member institutions - St. Luke’s - Roosevelt (where he is trustee-champion for one of the nation’s four obesity research centers), Beth Israel, Long Island College and New York Eye and Ear Hospitals. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the New York City Ballet, where he serves as co-chairman of the New Combinations Fund and is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Guild Hall in East Hampton. He is Treasurer and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Historic Hudson Valley and trustee of the Municipal Art Society. Mr. Wright also serves on the board of the Josiah Macy Foundation. In January 2005, Mr. Wright was appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury as a member of the Advisory Council of the Anglican Observer at the United Nations. Mr. Wright was elected a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations in 2000.

Mr. Wright has a special interest in innovative philanthropy. As such, he was a founding partner of the Acumen Fund which is a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty; and is a trustee of DonorsChoose which has become the template for charitable giving in public school education by using the internet to connect teachers to donors who fund specific project proposals for material or experiences their students need to learn, and was named the most innovative philanthropy of the year in 2005 by Amazon.com and Stanford Business School. He also was a speaker in November 2005 at the Yale School of Management’s conference on the Future of Philanthropy.

Mr. Wright lives in New York City.
October 2007