From afar, a life in public service would seem to offer few rewards. Global crises — disease, war, extreme weather — are unending. A poorly worded social media post can blossom overnight into a career-ending firestorm. Political divisions run so deep that the word “bipartisanship” can sound to some ears like a relic from a different age, a soda fountain in a Norman Rockwell painting. Yet to Wharton alumni, the landscape doesn’t appear quite so hopeless. They possess, to paraphrase Liam Neeson, a certain set of skills — skills that are especially useful for building coalitions and finding solutions to even the most complex problems.
We spoke with four graduates who forged their leadership talents at Wharton and have been drawn to public service at different moments in their lives: a former marketing executive who found a second career in local politics; a millennial mayor of the nation’s fifth-largest city; a retail king turned three-term Congressman; and a globe-hopping diplomat whose career spanned six presidencies. Each shows that in an age of division and digital distraction, magic can still be found in the simple act of Getting Things Done.
Kate Gallego WG12
Mayor, Phoenix, Arizona
Hot Town, Cool Mayor: Gallego speaks at a Black History Month kickoff event, organized by the Central Arizona chapter of the National Forum for Black Public Administrators, in February 2024.
Kate Gallego WG12 had been a member of City Council in Phoenix, Arizona, for about four years when she had to make The Decision. The city’s mayor, Greg Stanton, was planning to resign in 2018 to run for Congress, and Gallego, then in her mid-30s, had a keen interest in the nuts and bolts of governing. A special election would be held to replace Stanton, and Gallego wanted to be among the candidates vying for the job. But she was torn.
She was pregnant with her first child and going through a divorce, plus her mother had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. “At first, I thought I couldn’t do it,” she says. A cluster of supporters encouraged Gallego to maneuver past the Jenga tower of stress and anxiety that loomed over her personal life. Opportunity knocks, but it doesn’t wait around for long.
Gallego plunged into the race. She won the 2019 election to replace Stanton, then won reelection in 2020, earning 60 percent of the vote in a city in which Democratic and Republican voters are roughly equal in number. Now, at 43, she’s running for a second term as mayor. For most of her time in office, Phoenix has been among the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., with a thriving job market to match: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is investing $65 billion in city factories that will produce the microchips used to power smartphones, electric vehicles, and artificial intelligence.
In conversations with TSMC officials, Gallego tapped into her Wharton training. “Having that MBA background helped me answer questions they had about the business environment here and what Phoenix had to offer,” she says. “Hopefully, speaking the language of business made [the company] feel comfortable with an investment of that magnitude.”
Being mayor of the country’s fifth-largest city hadn’t been Gallego’s lifelong ambition. The Albuquerque native majored in environmental science at Harvard and headed west to work with the Salt River Project, a nonprofit that has supplied water and energy to millions of Arizona residents for over 100 years. Curiosity about entrepreneurship led her to Wharton, and the school imparted crucial data-management skills and an academic network that she still consults. (Kent Smetters, Boettner Professor at Wharton and faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, offered guidance on investment decisions affecting Phoenix’s municipal pensions.)
In 2013, Gallego ran for a seat on Phoenix’s City Council and won. The euphoria of her victory was soon tempered by a health crisis: She suffered a seizure and was temporarily unable to drive. Her need to rely on public transportation, she later told Phoenix Magazine, inspired her to push for an expansion of the city’s bus service and light rail systems and make streets more walkable.
It wouldn’t be the last time Gallego channeled a private struggle into thoughtful public policy. As a mayoral candidate, she spoke candidly about the turmoil she was experiencing outside the campaign. In an age when many politicians carefully sculpt their images, Gallego’s honesty resonated with voters. “It turns out that most of us don’t have flawless personal lives,” she says. “I was being as honest as I could. I did have a support system to help me succeed, so it would be top of mind for me to help others build support systems and make this a city where people can thrive professionally while they have complicated lives.”
Gallego thinks often of a management class she once took at Wharton. One lesson focused on a case study about the leader of a wilderness firefighting squad who had done a poor job of winning his team’s trust. A year after Gallego was sworn in as mayor, the COVID-19 pandemic began. “I tried to explain where I was getting my information and how I made my decisions, in hopes that people would feel a little more confident in me as a leader,” she says.
She guided the city through big events, including hosting Super Bowl LVII in 2023, and created an Office of Heat Response and Mitigation to address the impacts of climate change, using data to expand tree coverage in neighborhoods and build a network of cool corridors for pedestrians. “I love the whole government,” Gallego says. “You can get so much done and see the changes that you’re a part of very quickly.”
Kathryn Russell WG84
Selectperson, Deep River, Connecticut
Getting Personal: Russell talks with neighbors at an intimate “Coffee With Katie” event at the Pandemonium Thrift Shop in Deep River, CT.
For three hours each day, Kathryn Russell WG84 drives from one picturesque pocket of southern Connecticut to another — Haddam to Chester, Deep River to Essex, past historic properties and charming Main Street businesses, along the gentle curve of the Connecticut River. In each town, she searches for front doors and starts knocking.
She isn’t from these parts. She was raised in Detroit, and a marketing career led her to San Francisco and then New York, where she was a top executive for Fortune 500 companies, including American Express and AT&T. Then came other chapters — running a consulting startup, teaching at Fordham University and New York University.
Now, at 73, she asks Connecticut residents who open their doors to tell her about their lives, their needs — and whether they’d consider voting for her in November to be Middlesex County’s next state representative. This is the first time Russell, a Republican, has run for state office. (Her party comprises just 20 percent of registered voters in Connecticut.) She hands out campaign cards with her contact information and policy goals to the people she meets; many seem delighted by the fact that she isn’t a career politician. “People say to me, ‘No one’s listened to me in years,’ or ‘No one’s ever knocked on my door.’ I’m sobered by that,” she says.
Russell is energized by learning the ins and outs of a new career in public service — and putting to use leadership tools she gained from Wharton — at a time when many of her former marketing peers have retired. “I wouldn’t be happy,” she says, “just traveling to the beach.”
Russell took an initial interest in civic life as an undergrad at the University of Michigan but didn’t know how to parlay that into something meaningful. Eventually, a position as a promotional writer with Bank of America in San Francisco blossomed into a marketing career, but Russell soon noticed that many of her colleagues had MBAs. Her acceptance to Wharton in 1984 led her to what she describes as “a different world”: reading the Wall Street Journal with classmates, discussing world events over long lunches, learning to develop strategic frameworks to make management decisions.
Russell moved to New York, where she served as the vice president of retail industry marketing for American Express, leading a team of more than 20 people that brought in $1 billion in new business. In her free time, she tutored ESL students and volunteered with United Way. It was a full life — the rewarding career she’d yearned for as a young college graduate. Yet something else tugged at her, like a river current leading a raft downstream: Perhaps she could give more of herself to noble causes.
“There’s a challenge that Wharton gives you,” Russell explains. “From the first day, they build you up with a sense that you’re supposed to be delivering something meaningful because you’ve been selected into this elite group. We all began to think that way.”
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought everyday life to a halt, and Russell moved, full-time, to a home that she’d purchased 20 years earlier in Deep River. There, in a Capra-esque town of 4,700 people, she found a new calling. She joined the local library board, served on an affordable-housing committee, and volunteered at a soup kitchen. The town’s government, run by three selectpersons, struck her as disorganized and not particularly transparent — the sort of operation that might benefit from the skills she carried with her from Wharton.
She decided to run for one of the selectperson seats in the town in 2023, following in the footsteps of a favorite aunt who’d long lived in the area and held one of those seats. “My slogan was, ‘It’s about Deep River, not politics,’” Russell says. She won a minority seat and soon wove Wharton finesse into Deep River’s government: Meetings now included presentations, executive summaries, and multi-step plans to address long-term capital investment projects and rising real estate values. Russell was particularly concerned about education — the student population has been shrinking even as education funding consumes about 70 percent of the town’s budget — and attracting more businesses to the area.
Impressed, the state’s Republican Party asked Russell earlier this year to consider running for Middlesex County’s open state representative seat, covering four towns. “You have the same issues,” she says, “but you have a chance to have a broader impact and effect more positive change.”
It felt like the right time to take another chance. “Hopefully, we grow with our experiences through different stages of life,” Russell says. “Right now, I feel like I’m at the perfect stage. I have so much experience, and I’m deeply connected in this community. I’ve actually never been happier.”
David Trone WG85
Congressman, Maryland
On a Mission: Trone in September 2022 hosting a press conference on Capitol Hill for Congress Goes Purple, in recognition of National Recovery Month and to announce his Bipartisan Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder Task Force agenda.
David Trone WG85 found his way to a pay phone inside Vance Hall and started dialing. It was 1984, and Trone, then in his late 20s, had arrived at Wharton like many students, in search of tools that could help him find success. His quest, though, carried more urgency than those of many of his classmates.
His father, who’d struggled with alcoholism, had lost the family’s 200-acre chicken and hog farm near the Pennsylvania-Maryland border to bankruptcy. To help pay his way through school and support his family, Trone started working as an egg broker, buying eggs from farms and selling them to processing plants. In between Wharton classes, he made sales calls from the pay phone. “I’d pick up two or three cents a dozen,” Trone explains. In 1984, an avian flu outbreak led to the euthanizing of 17 million chickens and turkeys in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Trone was out of business. “Through no fault of your own,” Trone says, “sometimes bad things happen to good people.”
Before Trone’s time at Wharton ended, he and his brother opened a beer and soda store in Harrisburg, providing their family a glimmer of hope. The brothers grew the operation into Total Wine & More, a retail behemoth with 270 stores across the U.S. and annual revenues that have since climbed to $6 billion. But his insight into the human condition — that so many people carry unseen struggles — would help propel Trone, more than three decades later, into Congress. Since 2018, the Democrat has represented Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, focusing on what he describes as three pillars of interest: addiction, mental illness, and criminal justice reform.
In 2021, he and three other members of Congress helped launch the Bipartisan Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder Task Force. The task force grew to include over 140 lawmakers and passed more than two dozen bills aimed at developing impactful treatment and prevention policies. A year later, he helped pass the Restoring Hope for Mental Health and Well-Being Act, which expanded access to substance-abuse recovery programs.
Trone’s legislative achievements were fueled by personal experience: His nephew, Ian, died from a fentanyl-laced heroin overdose at age 24. “I look at it as being a public servant,” Trone says. “That’s a key difference between myself and many others in politics. I’m in it for a specific reason.” Ian’s death in 2016 inspired Trone to launch his first Congressional campaign that year. He lost the Democratic primary race for the 8th District but attracted widespread media attention; he’d invested more than $12 million of his own money into the campaign — a record for a U.S. House seat. “You learn at Wharton that failure is a strength,” he says. “You need to take it and learn from it. If we’re not failing, we’re not pushing for the ceiling.” Trone poured millions more into another race, the 6th District in 2018, and won.
Wharton also taught Trone the value of building a good team and convincing that team to row in the same direction. In Congress, he actively sought to collaborate with Republicans. “You can’t just sit where you’re comfortable,” says Trone, 69, a member of the House Committee on Appropriations. The two parties might seem defined on cable news by their antipathy towards each other, but Trone won Republican support for many of his legislative efforts, including a 2020 bill that repealed a longtime ban on incarcerated students receiving Pell Grants.
He found particular reward in helping Maryland residents who contacted his office for assistance with their everyday needs: navigating the state’s unemployment system, sorting out a visa issue, untangling student loan debt. “You feel really good,” he says, “about making a difference.” Trone didn’t view his seat in Congress as something to hold onto indefinitely, though. “I support term limits. I think people should serve, go home, and do something else,” he says. Trone spent $60 million on a Maryland Senate race this year but lost in the May Democratic primary. “I’ve done three terms in the House,” he says. “I think it’s time to move on.”
Hugh Dugan WG91
Former principal deputy special envoy for hostage affairs, U.S. State Department
A Special Homecoming: Dugan at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany in December 2019, awaiting the arrival of an American who had been held hostage in Iran.
For more than three decades, Hugh Dugan WG91 was perpetually on alert. A career in the foreign service, including a 26-year run as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations, meant he was often in the thick of addressing international crises, drafting resolutions, and managing complex relationships with foreign governments.
In 2015, Dugan retired and settled into a quieter life. He spent time with his family, became a go-to voice on foreign affairs for news outlets, and taught at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations. He’d left the Tom Clancy stuff behind — or so he thought. In 2019, he reconnected with an old friend who was in charge of a little-known agency with a high-stakes mission: the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. The office had been created by executive order just four years earlier by then-President Barack Obama and was continued by former President Donald Trump W68. Dugan was asked if he would come aboard as a principal deputy and infuse the agency with his decades of foreign policy expertise.
Dugan mulled the offer. Hostage negotiation had never before had its own place in government bureaucracy, so there would be some growing pains; other federal agencies were likely to resent a newer office encroaching on their territory. But his interest in government had been kindled decades earlier by a chance encounter with Americans who’d survived a hostage ordeal. Here was a chance to bring his life and career full circle. “I was in no position to say no,” Dugan says.
And so began an interesting coda — one that soon saw him named the office’s interim counsel. “I discovered that I had to build the bicycle while I was riding it,” he recalls. “We weren’t heavily resourced. We were competing for scraps at the table.”
Dugan says the office had to create a “presence of consequential outcomes for those who threatened us or tried to use hostages as a foreign policy tool.” The U.S. wouldn’t negotiate with terrorist groups or pay ransoms. Hostage recoveries could be worked out through diplomatic channels — or accomplished by force. In 2019, the office secured the release of 24 Americans who’d been taken hostage in foreign countries. “It’s not a scoreboard. You don’t want to compare one president to another,” Dugan says. “We’re talking about human lives.”
The path that eventually led to him helping reunite kidnapped Americans with their families began to take shape — patriotically enough — in 1976, when he and a group of 100 other high-school students spent a week visiting historic sites in Washington, D.C. The experience piqued his curiosity and led him to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. While attending graduate school, Dugan decided to take a foreign service exam and made the cut. He was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, then to the U.S. Consulate General in Bermuda, where he befriended a local retiree — Sir William Stephenson, who had served as Britain’s intelligence chief in the Western Hemisphere during World War II and is said to have been the inspiration for James Bond.
Dugan ended up back in Washington and attended Wharton as a State Department Fellow. He’d seen other cultures and governments through a diplomat’s eyes but felt he needed to “understand some of the principles that make the world go ’round.” He was struck by the collaborative spirit of his Wharton classmates: “The camaraderie was strong. There was no antagonism or competitiveness.”
In 1989, Dugan began a new assignment as a delegate who would serve as senior advisor to 11 U.S. ambassadors to the U.N. That November, the Berlin Wall fell, and a generation’s worth of Cold War tensions and restrictions crumbled along with it, setting the stage for a new era of global trade and cooperation. Delegates from Eastern countries were eager to discuss the mechanics of capitalist economies, and Dugan was armed with a plethora of Wharton lessons about market principles that helped inform a raft of resolutions. “I had a great deal of confidence,” he says, “that what I was putting on the table was more than Microeconomics 101, thanks to Wharton.”
Dugan’s second act in government — his work in hostage affairs — changed in 2020 when he joined the National Security Council and was appointed special assistant to the president and senior director for International Organization Affairs. The council, an advisory body, called upon Dugan’s decades of international expertise to help inform its recommendations to the president on matters of grave importance. That work drew to a close in 2021, giving him space to reflect on a lifetime of government service. A diplomat’s job, he says, “transcends one administration or another. You have to be a statesman. Politics end at the water’s edge when you go abroad.”
David Gambacorta is an investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer and a freelance writer.
Published as “Leadership in Action” in the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of Wharton Magazine.
