A wide-ranging interview with new Northeastern trustees chair Sy Sternberg, chairman of the board at New York Life
Last summer, Sy Sternberg, ME’68, got a new job title.
He’s quite accustomed to that. Over the course of a long, acclaimed career in insurance management, Sternberg has attracted position upgrades like a high-powered magnet.
But this announcement didn’t come from the boardrooms of midtown Manhattan; it came from Huntington Avenue. On July 1, 2008, Sternberg, sixty-five, a four-year member of Northeastern’s Board of Trustees, took over as that body’s chair, a position previously held for a decade by Neal Finnegan, BA’61, H’98.
Sternberg brings deep business acumen to his new post. The early-information-age innovations he oversaw at Raytheon starting in the 1960s led to a series of upper-level general-management posts at Mass Mutual in the 1970s and 1980s. Then he moved over to New York Life. By 1997, he was sitting behind its CEO desk.