Frederick Singer

At CASBS, Fred Singer will draft a book and launch his documentary’s next chapter on what he calls the High Achiever’s Dilemma: the tradeoffs ambitious people face around risk, opportunity, happiness, and social change, and the gap between their actions and identities and how it impacts their mental health. The documentary “5 Big Life Decisions” began in 1992, when Singer started filming his Harvard Business School classmates every five years to identify which decisions had shaped their lives. He has since extended the study to over 125 students from Stanford’s undergraduate Class of 2025, Stanford GSB 2026, and the Harvard Business School classes of 2023 and 2024, examining generational differences between Gen X and Gen Z.

Singer was a founder of WashingtonPost.com and an early employee at AOL as media moved from print to digital. He served as senior advisor to Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, leading media and e-commerce acquisitions across the U.S., Japan, and China, including the early Alibaba investment. When one of his sons was diagnosed with learning differences, he founded Echo360, a platform that helped move higher education toward active learning. His current work focuses on governance during the dual AI and climate transition.

Singer holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a JD, MA in philosophy, BA in philosophy with Distinction, and Bachelor of Commerce with Honours from Queen’s University in Canada, where he was awarded the Tricolour Award. He is a practitioner fellow at CASBS.