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> Disadvantages can become advantages.

Looking back at his own life, Hajim likes to cite Malcolm Gladwell’s book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. In it, Gladwell demonstrates the ways in which disadvantages can become advantages.

“If you have nobody, what do you develop? Self-reliance,” says Hajim. “If you have no means, you try to get means. All of a sudden these disadvantages as a child become advantages.”

Hajim says, candidly, that he’s really not sure how he overcame his circumstances. Part of it, he insists, was luck. “I look back at the places where I could have fallen off the cliff and never gotten back. Little things just turned in the right direction.” A big part of it was work and determination. “I was very driven,” he says, describing his work ethic when he was a youth.

When Hajim reached high school, he was lucky to be part of a community that allowed him to see greater possibilities ahead. At Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, New York, he recalls girlfriends and friends on the basketball court who were college bound. And the director of the orphanage he called home at the time was also a source of encouragement. “He had the mentality that everybody should go to college,” Hajim recalls.

By the time Hajim got to Rochester on a Naval ROTC scholarship, he had, by many measures “made it.” But being at a private college was a strange and unfamiliar experience for him, as it can be for many students from poor and working class backgrounds today.

“My first year was a very difficult social adjustment,” he says. “I was excited about what I was doing. But it was very hard because I was very different from everybody else.” But he’d developed a special skill from all the instability in his youth. He was used to figuring out how to adjust to new environments. “I had survived so much,” he says. “I wasn’t going to fail in this next adventure.”

> The best way to build an organization is to help people exceed their own goals.

Although he never lost his love for science and engineering, Hajim says that at Rochester, and later in the Navy, he found a new passion having to do more with people. “I found that I became fascinated with how to make organizations work, and how to assist people to accomplish more than they believed they could,” he says. He enrolled in Harvard Business School, where he had the chance to study organizations in a formal way. The goals of people who work in investment management are often assumed to be purely financial. But for Hajim, the fun is in the process—in creating the conditions to reach those goals. It’s an attitude he believes contributed significantly to his early success in investment management and later, to his ability to create winning teams at both E. F. Hutton and Lehman Brothers. “After getting my dream job as the chairman and CEO of a small investment bank, I really got a chance to put my strategy to work,” he says. “Over 14 years, I helped the firm to grow 10-fold in people and more in revenues and profits, at the same time that the industry lost half of the companies of similar size.” Hajim used a similar approach in the nonprofit sector. He became chair of the board of trustees at a local day school and president of the Harvard Business School alumni association. In the latter position, Hajim helped found the “Entrepreneurs Tool Kit,” which was used to develop several new initiatives for alumni. “My job as the chairman of the Board of Trustees at our University has been so rewarding,” he says, “since Meliora, ‘ever better,’ is what I’ve always believed in.”

> Define your “Four P’s”—passions, principles, partners, and plans.

When Hajim meets with his scholarship students, he says, “I give them a methodology that I hope will help them better plan their lives.” He calls it “the Four P’s.” “I tell them, ‘Find your passion(s), find your principles, find your partners, and finally, find your plans and your dreams.’”

“The University gives them a chance to test their passions and principles, and to understand how they will evolve. I push them to seek what really excites them, what makes them leap out of bed in the morning.” He believes in the saying, “If you love your work, you will never work.” He wants them to have as many experiences as they can, so they can test all or as many of the Four P’s as possible.

“It takes time and plenty of trials and errors to find your calling and to find out who you really are,” he says. Hajim encourages his scholarship students to change their majors if their interests are taking them in another direction. “I continue to use the Four P’s myself, and my involvement at the University has fulfilled one of my major plans, which was to find a way to give underprivileged students the same chance that I was given,” he says. He adds that one of his own principles is gratitude. “I feel I owe a great deal to so many people. I’ve long ceased to be a ‘one-man team.’ ”