Gerald Glover III, Esq.
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Age: 36
“Philadelphia-raised husband, father and serial builder who does best with too much on his plate.”
Hometown: Philadelphia, PA
Family Members: My incredibly supportive wife Erin and our two children, London (5) and Langston (1)
Fun fact about yourself: I’m the oldest grandchild of 42 cousins across both sides of my family. Bonus: I scored a hat trick in my first soccer game, but went on to play goalie for years.
Undergraduate School and Degree:
Ursinus College, Bachelor of Arts, Politics
Suffolk University Law School, Juris Doctor
Where are you currently working? Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP as a Senior Manager of Business Development Coaching
Extracurricular Activities, Community Work and Leadership Roles: Board member, Seattle Theatre Group; Lead, Governance Committee. Class lending library co-founder, Wharton SF Campus.
Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? Launching a lending library for my EMBA cohort. The idea started simple. Professors kept recommending optional books in class and on syllabi, and few people had time to track them down. One of my classmates had the idea to collate the recommendations. I partnered with him and a few others to then curate a broader collection of nonfiction and fiction titles and build a system where people could borrow books for flights to and from San Francisco or over breaks. We grew it to over 100 titles in a year. I remember scouring my local used bookstores for secondhand copies and then carrying a duffel bag of books to campus. It started as a practical fix and a pet project and became something the class really valued and is sad to leave — and one we’re glad future classes will enjoy.
Academically, sustaining near a 4.0 across my two majors (Strategy and General Management) means more to me than the number suggests. Growing up the oldest of four children, I quietly wondered if I was the least academically gifted of my siblings while they seemed to get all A’s. So, I was hit hard when a college professor suggested I consider paths other than law school after a disappointing LSAT score. Still, I persevered. I got into law school, was elected a leader by my peers, passed the bar the first time, and am about to graduate from the top business school in the world with a strong academic record. That arc matters to me, and I hope it can inspire others, including my children.
What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? At Davis Wright Tremaine, I built an entirely new department focused on client account strategy and deepening key firm relationships. At the end of that year, I was nominated for best manager at the firm — independently by both the partners I supported and the team that reported to me, neither group knowing the other was doing it. It was a complete surprise. It means a lot to me because of how much I respect the people who recognized me. It also set the template for how I think about building teams: do excellent work, learn what the individuals on your team want to achieve, and help them do so, and let the recognition take care of itself.
Why did you choose this school’s executive MBA program? Wharton is the oldest and often the top-ranked business school in the world. It also has a personal dimension for me as I was born and raised in Philadelphia. Penn was always in my orbit growing up, but it felt out of reach. Graduating from an Ivy League institution was something I wanted to achieve before my academic career was over and doing it at Wharton specifically closes a loop that started a long time ago.
The San Francisco campus also made the logistics workable for my family, which was important with two little kids (5 and 1), even if it meant countless 5 AM flights to make it to class on time. If I was to spend time away at school, I wanted to invest in something that was worth it in terms of the rigor and brand.
Who was your favorite MBA professor? Professor Gad Allon, Jeffrey A. Keswin Professor and Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions, and the director of the Management and Technology Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Gad made us take positions. Not hedge, not qualify everything, but actually commit to a recommendation and back it with analysis, numbers, or principled intuition. He modeled the same standard himself, and that’s what gave him the credibility to hold us to a high standard. He also has a dry sense of humor and genuinely cares about the students, which makes you want to show up prepared. He’s widely regarded as one of the best in the program, and I’d put him in my Wharton Mount Rushmore of professors.
What is the biggest lesson you gained during your MBA and how did you apply it at work? The biggest lesson I took from business school is that incentives drive people’s and organizations’ actions more than most leaders realize. This thread ran through nearly every course — anti-money laundering, operations strategy, marketing, business model innovation, and entrepreneurship. People do what they’re rewarded for doing. Daniel Pink makes this case compellingly in his book Drive, and I saw it confirmed across disciplines.
When I coach partners at Orrick, I don’t have authority over them – and I don’t have a traditional incentive to offer. So, I lean into competition and public recognition of wins, extrinsic nudges that work because the underlying drive is already there.
If the incentive isn’t aligned with the behavior you want, that’s a design problem. As a leader, you have an opportunity, and responsibility, to fix it.
Give us a story during your time as an executive MBA on how you were able to juggle work, family and education? My wife and I had a failed adoption a few months before I started at Wharton. The birth mother chose to keep her child, which was the right outcome for that family. We knew we’d try again, and we anticipated it would happen during the program.
It did. In my second term, we connected with a birth mother who was in her third trimester. Her due date was about six weeks out. I was wrapping up a class weekend in San Francisco, bags packed in the airport lounge about 90 minutes from my flight home, when my wife called. The birth mother was going into labor. The baby was coming early.
I found a quiet corner, put Erin on speaker, and spent the next 30 minutes booking flights to New Orleans, reserving a rental car and finding an Airbnb — all before boarding my flight back to Seattle. I landed, unpacked, repacked, got some sleep, and then flew to Louisiana the next morning with my wife and daughter. We met our son Langston the day he was born. He’s 18 months old now.
We stayed in Louisiana 12 days until the interstate paperwork cleared. I came home Thursday, packed again, and flew to San Francisco early the next morning for the class weekend. I had done my homework during evenings the preceding week and on that flight to class. The next 18 months were focused on juggling work, a growing family and a rigorous curriculum.
What advice would you give to a student looking to enter an executive MBA program? Tell the story of what you genuinely care about and why your particular background makes you the right person to pursue it. Once you’ve met the baseline requirements, the thing that will set you apart is coming across as a good human who takes positions, works hard, and is willing to invest in themselves and others to be a force for positive change in the world. Describe your passion in a way that gets others energized about it. In my opinion, that’s what admissions committees remember, and it’s what your classmates will remember too.
When I applied, I led with what I’d built, why it mattered to me and others, and what I was looking forward to building next. That felt right then and I’m glad I did it.
What was your biggest regret in business school? Choosing two courses to satisfy a major requirement rather than two I was genuinely curious about. Those ended up being my least favorite classes I took in the program, and I had every opportunity to drop them before the add/drop deadline. The rest of my Wharton experience was exceptional, but that one trade-off still bothers me. What I took from the experience is that when the curriculum gives you flexibility, use it to follow your intellectual curiosity, not optimize for a credential that others likely value less than you think they do.
What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? Two moments stand out. In Marketing Research, we explored the use of AI-generated synthetic personas — stand-ins for target customers that can be used to test messaging, pricing and go-to-market approaches before spending on real research.
In my Entrepreneurship course, our professor encouraged us to use AI to generate an initial list of business ideas — 10 concepts to pressure-test before committing to one. The real work was in the filtering: asking hard questions about market dynamics, competitive positioning and customer fit.
The insight I took from both experiences is that AI expands the top of the funnel, but the judgment required to narrow it down is still entirely human. Wharton’s tagline is “knowledge for action.” We shouldn’t delegate that part to AI.
What was the main reason you chose an executive MBA program over part-time or online alternatives? I chose Wharton because it’s the best. Even more, the San Francisco campus made it possible for me to pursue an MBA without being unavailable for work or family for extended periods of time.
Of course, there are more convenient and cheaper ways to get a business education. But I wanted to be challenged by world-class faculty alongside a cohort of kind, smart, driven people from around the world and across sectors. And I wanted the credential to reflect that investment.
The executive format and work experience requirements also ensured my classmates were peers — people managing teams, running businesses, and navigating the same career inflection points I was. That context made every class discussion deeper and more specific, and every relationship more meaningful.
How did you finance your EMBA and what did you do to make tuition and associated costs more affordable? My wife and I made deliberate choices about how we spent and saved during the program. Ultimately, I financed the degree through loans, which is, of course, a significant commitment for a family with two young kids. But we agreed early on that if I was going to do this, Wharton was worth the cost. Two years later, I have no doubt we made the right call. And I expect that calculation to only shift more in my favor over time.
What is your ultimate long-term professional goal? My long-term goal is to lead at the intersection of technology, law and policy — whether inside a company shaping how AI or financial innovation transforms people’s lives, or inside an institution shaping the rules that govern it. I’ve spent my career building programs from scratch inside large organizations. I want to do that at a scale where the stakes are higher and the impact is broader. The through-line has always been the same: find a hard problem, build something that didn’t exist before, and bring good people along.
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