LETTERS
To the Editor

Kudos to Katen
Congratulations, you got it right: Karen Katen is the correct choice for the GSB Distinguished Corporate Alumna Award. You have shown that highly placed individuals of great business acumen can also possess a broader-based consciousness that emboldens them to scale vertical spires and pry the steely facade off the face of business and place a beating human heart at its core. Katen has proven that Big Business can take it and run with it.

Let us offer a firsthand account on a human-interest level to drive home a point. In 1998, as we fought to save the family cat, [afflicted] with the very rare vaccine-induced fibrosarcoma, we appealed to the drug manufacturer, Pfizer, to help defray some of the considerable expense of radiation treatment at University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

It is our pleasure to publicly report that [Pfizer's] technical service veterinarian Nancy Postorino Reeves, in her generous extension of time and funds, may have changed forever what we have come to expect from business in terms of responsiveness and responsibility, and to affirm, without reservation, that Katen and her team do, in fact, live and work by the pledge put forth in their mission statement found inside the cover of every Pfizer annual report. If Katen is able, through force of character, to instill this attention to the small detail of one tiny gray-and-white domestic cat, one can only imagine to what heights she has yet to carry us all on her able, still young, wings.

David L. Cotton, '79,
and Carol M. Cotton