Peatros Haile

Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

“Principled leader bridging sectors to drive meaningful impact.”

Hometown: Albany, NY

Fun fact about yourself: My father won a rare visa lottery, enabling our family of eight to emigrate from Eritrea to the United States.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Rochester Institute of Technology, B.S. in Biomedical Sciences; University at Albany, Master’s in Public Health

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? City of Albany, NY, Deputy Chief City Auditor

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? Amazon in Seattle HQ

Where will you be working after graduation? UnitedHealth Group, Associate Director, UHG Leadership Experience (ULE)

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

• Fellow at the Center for Business, Government & Society
• Tuck Admissions Fellow
• Tuck Compass (Personal Board of Advisors, Leadership Coaching)
• Consortium Fellow
• Tuck Basketball Club Co-Chair

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? In my Leading Disruptive Change capstone project, I built a digital platform and virtual AI advisory board to support an incoming mayor navigating two defining challenges: stewarding a historic $400 million in state economic development funding and responding to rising violence. As the city’s first Black mayor, she faced not only operational decisions, but deeply adaptive work: leading through ambiguity, addressing historical mistrust, and holding competing truths—equity and growth, safety and community trust—while shifting how stakeholders saw both the problems and one another.

I am most proud of this project not because of the technology itself, but because it reframed leadership as a responsibility to orchestrate systems-level change. Rather than offering policy recommendations, I designed a tool to surface competing stakeholder perspectives, anticipate second-order effects, and prompt values-based tradeoffs. The experience reinforced my belief that durable impact comes not from technical fixes alone, but from disciplined, principled leadership that mobilizes people through uncertainty.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? One of the achievements I am most proud of in my professional career was modernizing the City of Albany’s outdated, paper-based accounts payable system.

When I began my tenure, I conducted a review of our core business processes. Through firsthand observation and informal interviews, I identified a major bottleneck: a paper-based accounts payable system that caused delayed vendor payments, misplaced documentation, and limited transparency. While many recognized the inefficiencies, there was deep skepticism toward technology and no consensus on a path forward.

After researching best practices and evaluating multiple vendors, my office partnered with the Office of Innovation to select a platform and build a prototype. We piloted the system for several months, hosted town halls to address concerns, and iterated based on employee feedback before launching citywide. The results were significant. Processing times decreased by 33%, enabling faster vendor payments, and departments gaining real-time visibility and accountability.

What makes this achievement especially meaningful is what happened next. Just months into the pilot, COVID-19 forced our 1,200-person workforce to shift remote. Although remote work was never the original use case, the digital platform enabled uninterrupted city services during a moment of crisis. What began as an operational efficiency project became critical infrastructure.

I am proud not only of the measurable impact, but of leading cultural change in an environment resistant to it, building trust, aligning stakeholders, and proving that disciplined execution can strengthen public service.

Why did you choose this business school? I chose Tuck for its accessibility, not just to resources, but to people. In many MBA programs, networks exist in theory. At Tuck, they are lived. I was drawn to the intimacy of the community, where professors know you personally, alumni respond to cold emails within hours, and peers are invested in one another’s growth beyond transactional networking.

Coming from a public-sector background, I didn’t just want technical skill-building; I wanted proximity to leaders who would stretch my thinking and hold me accountable to a higher standard. Tuck’s culture of approachability and engagement has done exactly that, shaping not only how I think, but who I am becoming as a leader.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? Scott Anthony stands out not simply because of the content he teaches, but because of how he teaches it.

He has a rare ability to present complex frameworks through multiple lenses, whether through case discussion, practical application, or personal reflection, ensuring the material truly sinks in. I can confidently say that his lessons on navigating disruption and leading adaptive change have reshaped how I approach both professional decisions and personal challenges.

What distinguishes him most, however, is his thoughtfulness and vulnerability in the classroom. He models intellectual humility while pushing students to think rigorously. His willingness to experiment with teaching methods mirrors the very innovation he teaches, creating an environment where students are fully engaged and willing to wrestle with ambiguity.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? Leading Disruptive Change was my favorite course because it fundamentally shifted how I understand leadership.

The frameworks were immediately applicable, not only to other classes, but to my professional work and personal life. The course forced me to distinguish between technical problems and adaptive challenges, and to recognize that many leadership failures stem from misdiagnosing one for the other.

Beyond theory, the course demanded introspection. It pushed me to examine how I show up in moments of uncertainty and resistance, and how disciplined, principled leadership can mobilize others through change. That shift in mindset will stay with me far longer than any single case study.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? One of my favorite MBA traditions at Tuck has been the weekly executive dinners. Each week, senior leaders, often Tuck or Dartmouth alumni, come to campus. It is not only to speak in class, but to sit down with a small group of students over dinner. What makes these evenings special is not the résumé of the executive, but the access.

Around the dinner table, conversations move beyond prepared remarks to candid reflections on career inflection points, failures, tradeoffs, and even personal vulnerability – insights you would rarely find in a Forbes profile or Wall Street Journal feature. Executives speak not as distant leaders, but as members of the same community who once sat in our seats.

For me, these dinners reflect what drew me to Tuck in the first place: accessibility to our incredible alumni. The tradition embodies Tuck’s culture of intimacy and engagement, where leadership is not observed from afar, but experienced up close.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? Looking back, the one thing I would do differently is more fully leverage the breadth of Dartmouth beyond the business school. While I immersed myself deeply in the Tuck community, I now realize I could have been more intentional about taking courses at the Geisel School of Medicine and the Thayer School of Engineering, and building relationships with students and faculty across those programs.

As someone interested in the intersection of technology, health care, and leadership, those cross-disciplinary perspectives would have further sharpened my thinking. The proximity to world-class experts in medicine and engineering was a unique advantage. While I engaged in conversations informally, I would have benefited from more structured academic and networking involvement.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? One of the most impactful case studies I had in business school was “DBS Bank: The Quest to Leap from Local Laggard to Best Bank in the World.” What struck me most was that DBS’s transformation was not primarily about technology or strategy, but about mindset and behavior.

A pivotal moment in the case was DBS’s decision to stop benchmarking itself against other regional banks and instead compare itself to technology leaders like Google, Amazon, Netflix, and Apple. That reframing forced the organization to rethink its identity from a conservative financial institution to a “28,000-person startup.”

What made the transformation stick was how intentionally those behaviors were embedded. Initiatives like Meeting MOJO and the Kiasu Committee were structured interventions designed to shift norms, increase psychological safety, and make innovation habitual. The biggest lesson I learned is that transformation begins with redefining who you believe you are competing with and then designing systems to reinforce this transformation.

What business leader do you admire most? I have a great deal of respect for Dario Amodei because of his relentless commitment to placing integrity and principles ahead of short-term profit. In an industry defined by speed, scale, and competitive pressure, he has consistently emphasized safety, alignment, and long-term societal impact in the development of advanced AI systems.

What I admire most is his willingness to make difficult tradeoffs in order to uphold those values. Rather than pursuing growth at any cost, he has advocated for responsible development, transparency, and thoughtful governance in a space where the stakes are extraordinarily high. His leadership reflects the belief that technological progress and ethical responsibility are not mutually exclusive, but must advance together.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? In addition to providing students with premium accounts to leading large language models, Tuck has integrated AI directly into the classroom experience. One of my favorite examples was Professor Robert Shumsky’s course, Predictive Analytics with Generative AI. In the course, Python was the default tool for data analysis, but rather than writing code manually, we used ChatGPT to generate it.

What made the class impactful was not simply using AI to write code, but critically evaluating what it produced. We explored both the power and the limitations of generative AI for analytics, examining how models can embed hidden assumptions about the data, quietly select performance metrics, or structure analysis in ways that may not be obvious to the user.

The biggest insight I gained was that AI can dramatically accelerate productivity, but it does not replace judgment. Effective use of generative AI requires understanding the underlying statistical concepts, questioning outputs, and recognizing where human oversight is essential. In that sense, the course reframed AI not as a shortcut, but as a powerful collaborator that still demands informed leadership.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? I have a great deal of respect for my classmate, Isaiah De La Cruz. I could point to his sharp insights in class or the work ethic that earned him a return offer in banking, but what truly sets Isaiah apart is his authenticity and deep commitment to building community.

One initiative I was fortunate to support alongside him was the inaugural Christmas Tree & Turkey Drive, a partnership with Mount Lebanon Elementary School that provided holiday support to 30 families in the Upper Valley. Isaiah didn’t just organize the effort; he rallied classmates, built trust with local partners, and ensured the initiative was thoughtful and sustainable.

What I admire most is his ability to move seamlessly across different audiences. Whether he is in a room full of bankers, community members, or professors, Isaiah contributes meaningfully and helps the group see connections that are not immediately obvious. He consistently pushes conversations beyond what is directly in front of us toward broader, long-term impact.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?

1. Serve as a trusted bridge between industry and the public sector (helping align innovation, policy, and public trust)

2. Join Tuck’s Board of Advisors

What made Peatros Haile such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with Peatros through both his First-Year Project and the Tuck Compass program, where he participated in the Personal Board of Advisers. What stands out most is his rare combination of warmth and earnestness with a deeply intentional pursuit of impact.

Peatros brings genuine intellectual curiosity to both classroom and team settings. He blends analytical rigor, creativity, and collaboration in ways that elevate the quality of thinking and strengthen group cohesion. In his final First-Year Project presentation, he paired strong analysis with a leadership presence that commanded respect and engagement. I have seen that same thoughtful intentionality in his work with the Personal Board of Advisers.

Peatros combines principled thinking with the ability to mobilize others around ideas. That combination serves him well as a leader and makes him an invaluable member of the Tuck community.”

Daniella Reichstetter (T’07)
Clinical Professor of Business Administration
Faculty advisor, Tuck Center for Entrepreneurship

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