As captain of the Dartmouth rowing team, Sydney Williams ’94 learned to work with others in a sport that demands individual precision with each stroke. “Rowing is the ultimate team exercise,” Williams says. “There is a sense of loyalty. I believe in loyalty. I believe in relationships.”
Before business school, he worked for Treuhandanstalt in Berlin, an agency mandated by the government to help privatize East Germany. Williams missed the East Coast, and after earning his MBA, he began a 10-year career at Deutsche Bank in New York and London.
Williams’s respect for the big picture is apparent now in his leadership as president of Lyceum Associates (www.lyceumassociates.com), an information-networking firm he founded in 2005 with his wife, Beatriz Chantrill Williams ’99. Lyceum develops collaborative roundtable debates among diverse participants from across the industry, rather than just having the opinions of an individual expert. “At Deutsche Bank, our business was all about the exchange of information and the value that people put on that,” Williams says. “Lyceum is about community. It’s about pushing boundaries. It’s about everything that has been important to me over the years.”
Lyceum focuses on healthcare, financial markets and consumer business, and Williams stresses the importance of having a wide range of participants at the meetings to represent all facets of and perspectives on the industry. “If it’s a topic on pharmacy, it’s not just a bunch of drug manufacturers in the room,” he says. “There are drug manufacturers, distributors, pharmacy-benefit managers, providers and consumers. We have each piece of the value chain, so it’s not like a conversation within an echo chamber.” Williams also looks at how changes in one industry can be applied to another, such as how big pharmaceutical manufacturers might apply lessons learned from the open-source-software movement.
“By adding all these pieces together, we can create a powerful group dynamic,” Williams says. “And if properly orchestrated, large groups of people can achieve a lot more than one expert.”