Myra M. Hart
Professor of Entrepreneurship, Harvard Business School

Born 1940 in Evanston, Illinois.

Dr. Myra Maloney Hart is a retired professor of entrepreneurship (1995–2007) at Harvard Business School, where she held the Class of 1961 Chair in Entrepreneurship and served as co-chair of the Entrepreneurship faculty from 1999 to 2002.

Dr. Hart was commended for faculty leadership with the Greenhill Award, given by the dean of Harvard Business School in recognition of outstanding and significant contributions to the school.

While at Harvard Business School, Dr. Hart started MBA courses independently and in collaboration with faculty colleagues, including Starting New Ventures; Women Building Business; and Building Businesses in the Context of a Life.

Dr. Hart, along with her colleague Professor Marco Iansiti, won the Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching for their Starting New Ventures course. The Apgar Prize recognizes a faculty member “who motivates students’ interest, curiosity, and love of learning; proposes and applies new teaching concepts and methods; and serves as a mentor to stimulate students’ intellectual development.”

Dr. Hart is also responsible for the creation and direction of several entrepreneurial executive programs and HBS alumnae programs for women re-entering the work-force, including Women Leading Business: A New Kind of Conversation; Charting Your Course: Working Options; and A New Path: Setting New Career Directions.

She served as chair/director of the Marjorie Alfus/Committee of 200 Case Writing Initiative (1998), which created more than seventy-five Harvard Business School business case studies with women in the protagonist/leadership role. The goal was to increase the availability of quality teaching materials featuring women as key decision-makers.

Dr. Hart is a member of the Diana Project, a research team of five professors established in 1999 to investigate women entrepreneurs’ access to capital and to raise awareness and expectations of women business owners regarding the growth of their firms. Other team members include Dr. Candida Brush (Babson College), Dr. Nancy M. Carter (INSEAD and Catalyst), Dr. Elizabeth J. Gatewood (Wake Forest University), and Dr. Patricia G. Greene (Babson College). The Diana Project was awarded the international 2007 FSF-NUTEK Award, which recognizes those who produce scientific work of outstanding quality and importance related to entrepreneurship. (FSF is the Swedish Foundation for Small Business Research and NUTEK is the Swedish Agency for Economic & Regional Growth.)

Books authored by the Diana Project team include International Growth-Oriented Women Entrepreneurs and Their Businesses: A Global Research Perspective (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006); Women and Entrepreneurship: Contemporary Classics (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006); and Clearing the Hurdles: Women Building High-Growth Businesses (FT Prentice Hall, 2004).

Prior to her tenure at Harvard Business School, Dr. Hart was a co-founding officer at Staples (1985–1990); director of marketing at Star Market, a division of the Jewel Company (1983–1985); and general manager of Hart, Shaw & Company, a family-owned residential and commercial real-estate firm.

Dr. Hart serves on the board of directors at Kraft Foods and Office Depot and is on the Smithsonian Institution National Board. She has served as a director on numerous private and entrepreneurial and advisory boards, and as a trustee of several university boards. She was chair of the Springboard Enterprises New England Forum in 2000 and 2001. She was a visiting scholar at The Center for Women’s Leadership at Babson College in 2007 and at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research in 2008.

She received a doctorate of business administration from Harvard Business School (1995), an MBA from Harvard Business School (1981), and a BA from Cornell University (1961).

Elizabeth Ghaffari: Can you give me a little bit of your background and that of your family?

Dr. Myra M. Hart: I was born in Evanston, Illinois, and was raised in the Chicago suburbs. I have six brothers and one sister. All of us are very close. Pretty much all of us are actively engaged in business, though in many different dimensions. For example, my youngest brother is a sports writer for Knight Ridder, while my sister started in education but switched to become an obstetrical nurse.

With a family of eight kids, my mom was an at-home mom, while my dad was a small-business man.

My high school had about four thousand students and was co-ed. I was a good student and an ambitious person who looked for opportunities to get the absolute best possible education. I wanted a university that was bigger than my high school. In looking at the range of alternatives available to me, I considered Cornell, Stanford, and Duke. At that time, Cornell and Penn were the only Ivy League schools accepting women. I was not a city girl, so I really did not consider going to a city university. I wanted a totally enclosed campus. Cornell seemed to meet my needs perfectly, so I went there and was extremely happy.

Ghaffari: What was your major at Cornell?

Hart: Government. And I minored in languages. I thought I was going to be a superstar in the Foreign Service. I was wrong about that.

Ghaffari: What was your first job after college?

Hart: I got married right out of college. My husband and I went to Stanford, where he went to law school. I taught in the public school system in California, putting him through law school. We returned to the Chicago area in 1965. When my father-in-law died in 1967, I took over leadership of the family residential and commercial real estate business, Hart, Shaw & Company. The focus of the business then was primarily residential.

I ran Hart, Shaw & Company from 1967 until 1975 when my husband’s job change required that we move out of Chicago. We sold the business and moved to Michigan for the next four years.

Ghaffari: How and why did you decide to go back to school at get a business degree?

Hart: I learned at Hart-Shaw that I was really good at business, but I certainly didn’t know everything about it. I thought I would be a lot better businessperson and much more credible if I had an MBA from a top-notch business school. After I put my husband though law school, I made a deal with him that one day I would go back to school and get my degree as well.

So I began to lobby that the kids were old enough and that I felt the time was right to pursue the opportunity of going to business school. When we moved to Michigan to follow his career, we agreed that within the next four years I could call the shots on where we would go next. In 1979, we moved to Boston so that I could get my MBA at Harvard.

He switched from working as in-house counsel for Dow Chemical to another chemical company. However, the marriage didn’t really survive that long after we got to Boston. We stayed together until I finished my degree. I was fortunate that, when I was off on my own, I was also completely able to take care of myself and my children.

My husband and I had been high school sweethearts. We were married for twenty-two years and had three children. We divorced in 1983, and then I was a single mom for the next eleven years. Then I married someone that I knew as a friend in college, and we’ve been married seventeen years now. He’s a retired physician. He had four children of his own, so together we have seven children.

Ghaffari: What was your first job after your MBA?

Hart: I finished my MBA in 1981 and went into food retailing with the Jewel Company, headquartered in Chicago. I chose the company because I had a great deal of respect for the integrity of the firm, their mission, and the quality of the people running it.

There also were very personal reasons for my choice. Jewel agreed to let me work in the Star Market division, which was headquartered in Cambridge, for the next five years. That allowed me to develop my career without uprooting the family before my youngest graduated from high school. I was very committed to not creating any more disruption or chaos in my children’s lives. They had moved to Boston on my behalf. Then, we went through a divorce, which was inevitably disruptive. I promised my kids I wouldn’t make them change schools or in any way follow my career.

Jewel was very accommodating, saying, “There’s plenty of room for you to develop and become an important part of our organization in Star Market. Whenever you are ready, you can come to Chicago.” So that worked out well from the perspective of what I wanted to do as a career. The company was very accommodating.

Ghaffari: Did you go to Chicago with Jewel?

Hart: You can plan all you want, but Jewel was acquired in a hostile takeover in 1984. American Stores bought it, so headquarters were relocated to Salt Lake City. Of course, one of my primary reasons for wanting a Chicago-based company was that my whole family was there. It was a great extended family for me and for my children. I didn’t see any advantage to my moving independently to Salt Lake City. While I did have a very good set of career options with the company, I was much more open to the kind of headhunter calls that I began getting on a regular basis.

I got a call from a colleague whom I had met at Star Market. He had also gone to Harvard as an undergrad and to Harvard Business School, and—though he was younger than I was because he went in a more linear trajectory—he had been at Star for about eight years before I joined the team. He had been in their fast-track management development program and then had left Star to become president of First National Supermarkets in Connecticut. For a variety of reasons, he left First National to start a new business.

His name was Tom Stemberg. He had written a business plan for Staples and was looking for venture capital money. He got push back—not on the concept—but on the idea of who’s going to run the company. At first, in a somewhat naïve way, Tom told them, “You know, once I get some money, I’ll build my team. Here are some ideas about how I might go there.” The venture capitalists replied, “No. Don’t you know that it’s all about execution, especially in retail? So while we like the idea, we won’t invest until we know who’s going to be on the founding team.”

So Tom called me for a drink. He showed me his business plan. I thought it was fantastic. I didn’t think conceptually that there was a problem. I told him, “The only thing that could bring us down is a failure to execute flawlessly.” Tom asked me if I would be the vice president of operations. That offer surprised me somewhat because, at that time, I was head of marketing at Star Market. Tom had also been head of marketing before he left to become the president at First National. He had decided to bring on another person who was the VP of marketing for Osco Drugs. So Tom said to me, “You’re the one who has the deepest operating experience, so that’s what we want you to do.”

Next, we found and solidified relationships with two other fellows who joined the founding team. Together, the four of us went back to the venture market. We got the money within six weeks of when we got our team together, and it was a very exciting time.

Needless to say, Staples was quite successful for both the investors and the original players. For me, it was absolutely terrific. I don’t think there was anything you could plan. You couldn’t say, “And then I’m going to be an entrepreneur in an incredibly successful venture,” especially because I have to be very honest and say that I had really thought I would build my career in a corporate environment. I thought I was pretty well suited to that, but when the entrepreneurial opportunity came along, I quickly adapted, and it really worked well. I think I did a great job for them, and they did a great thing for me by giving me that amazing opportunity.

Staples also made us reasonably well-off in a very short time. I was approaching my fiftieth birthday, and my last child had gone off to college. I was still single. And I asked myself, “What would you do with the rest of your life if you didn’t have to show up to get a paycheck?” I concluded that I would not be staying at the company, but there were several options open to me.

Probably most of us think deeply about how we want to make a difference in the world. And I felt that I could try to go about it one step at a time or I could try to touch the lives of many people and influence the world through others. I chose the latter path. I thought, “There are a couple of different directions, but I think that my next venture is going to be in teaching. That could take the form of something as frontline as going into the Peace Corps and teaching in a community, teaching the principles of business and being entrepreneurial, but in a very simple and straightforward way. Or, it could be teaching in an academic setting.”

I chose the academic direction—to be among the people who were truly going to be leaders around the world, trying to influence, at least in some small way, how they think about strategic issues, diversity issues, and environmental issues. As a teacher, I thought I might not touch everyone I come in contact with, but there certainly would be many I could influence.

So I chose teaching. I chose Harvard Business School, both to get my doctorate and fortunately to be able to be on the faculty.

Ghaffari: Were there any mentors who helped you make that decision?

Hart: I really owe the decision in large part to some of the faculty with whom I worked when I was an MBA student. One in particular, Chris Christensen, supervised my independent study for two years, and he strongly encouraged me to think about life as a faculty member at Harvard Business School. I told him, back then, that I had come to business school in order to generate a lot of personal wealth to support myself and my children. Becoming a faculty member wasn’t necessarily the avenue to that goal. And being a student for an additional five years, in order to get my doctorate, was certainly something that was not in my life plan. At Harvard the doctorate is a DBA, a doctor of business administration.

Once Staples went public, there were a couple of things that happened. Each of the officers met with a financial advisor and also with members of the board in order to discuss whether the officers were going to stay or leave. With an IPO, after the six-month hold back, there’s a triggering event, and many people have the wherewithal to walk away as I did. I called Chris Christensen and said, “Chris, I think I could afford to become a faculty member now.”

Ghaffari: Was Harvard supportive?

Hart: Yes, very! While I made a joke of it, then, I knew that the value of investing in me could be questionable. I asked Chris, “What do you think? Is it still a viable option?” And to be honest, it’s a pretty big reach to think about the enormous investment that a university makes in a doctoral student in terms of the dedication of faculty time. As a doctoral student, you are working one-on-one with your thesis advisor and your thesis committee.

It might be a very effective use of their time, but it’s not a very efficient use of their time. So, rationally, you’d think they would like to invest in much younger candidates who will have a very long runway in which to utilize that training. I believe it was a great gift that Harvard Business School gave me—to enable me to have that kind of education.

I had a deep connection to the institution, and I had some good business experience, but, honestly, if you look at when I came out of the pipeline, I probably had a maximum of fifteen years of active classroom time available to them. Certainly, it’s not just the teaching they’re interested in. It’s the research pipeline and what you can contribute to the creation of knowledge, as well as dissemination of knowledge. So, it was a great leap of faith on their part that I could make some payback on their investment, and it was absolutely delightful that it worked well. I think it worked well for me and for Harvard Business School. But I never underestimate the value of the gift that I believe they gave me.

Ghaffari: If I could opine here—I think they pretty well got their money’s worth.

Hart: I hope so. I hope so.

Ghaffari: You were in the doctoral program from 1990 to 1995, and then you immediately joined the faculty at Harvard Business School. Is that right?

Hart: Yes, and it is rather unusual to join the faculty of the school where you got your doctorate. There are many, many people who get their doctorate, go somewhere else, and then maybe come back later. In my career, I didn’t have a huge window of opportunity in which I could go out to prove myself, develop different perspectives, and come back. If I was going to be valuable to the school, it had to be right away.

Fortunately, things worked in my favor, and I think it worked out very well for Harvard as well.

Ghaffari: When you came on the faculty, was there an entrepreneurship program?

Hart: There was indeed. Historically, we would go back and say that the entrepreneurship program was born in the 1940s when some of the returning veterans came to Harvard Business School after World War II. There were many people who couldn’t have considered Harvard Business School prior to the GI Bill. They offered the school a whole new perspective on business career paths. Many of the new students were interested in starting their own businesses rather than going into the financial services or Fortune 500 careers as had students and graduates in prior years.

The entrepreneurship program was started with a simple course—a single course—on how to start new ventures. Later, it was significantly enhanced. It became quite a serious program, growing to the point of not being just special course offerings, but actually being a unit or department at Harvard Business School when Howard Stevenson took over its leadership in the early 1980s. And Howard hired and developed a faculty.¹

When I joined the faculty in ’95, there were just a few people associated with entrepreneurship as their primary interest. That would have included Howard Stevenson, Amar Bhide (innovation and entrepreneurship), Teresa Amabile (individual productivity, team creativity, and organizational innovation), and Bill Sahlman (investment and financing decisions in entrepreneurial ventures).

I studied under Howard Stevenson (my thesis advisor), Clay Christensen (technology and business model innovation), Dick Walton (organizational theory), and Bill Sahlman (on my thesis committee). All of them had a very strong interest in entrepreneurship long before I got there.

From 1995 until today, there has been explosive growth in the entrepreneurship faculty, so today there probably are about thirty-five full-time faculty in that area. When I came in 1990 to get my doctorate, I specifically indicated that that’s what I wanted to study. At the time, it was under the banner of “business policy.” Around 1997, it was spun out and became a separate division. So entrepreneurship has been around for a long time.

Ghaffari: Pretty soon you started to develop some new courses, such as Starting New Ventures.

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Hart: Yes, Professor Marco Iansiti and I co-developed and co-led Starting New Ventures as a new course, but in a way it was a new version of a much older course that had its origins back in the forties. That eventually morphed into entrepreneurial management, which looked at entrepreneurial behavior in many different settings. For example, it examined the idea that you could become very entrepreneurial within a structured corporate environment or in a nonprofit. We did take a look at this subset of entrepreneurship that was strictly about building a new company.

I’d say we did a little bit of refocusing. We said, “Entrepreneurship is very broad. It can be practiced in many different places, but some of our students are interested in the specifics of starting a business from scratch so let’s focus not only on the strategic, but also on the mechanical, issues of how you start a new venture.” We developed many courses focused on even more specific aspects: building human resources in an entrepreneurial venture, compensation in new ventures, building financial resources, and venture capital/private equity courses.

Ghaffari: What would you say was your primary contribution at Harvard?

Hart: The one thing that I would identify as unique to my experience at Harvard is that, after a couple of years, I began to focus on women—a focus that came out of a survey I conducted of our graduates in order to identify how many of them actually did start new ventures or joined startup ventures over the course of their careers. Harvard keeps very good data on our graduates, but we had not always followed exactly what they’re doing five and ten years later. So I began to conduct those long-term surveys.

I developed many hypotheses about what graduates might be doing. It turns out that Harvard Business School graduates are very, very entrepreneurial. More than half identified themselves as entrepreneurs, and 40 percent are involved in a startup or a privately-held business. They typically don’t do it right after graduation, but they gravitate to entrepreneurship later in their careers. The really interesting question for me was, “What do women graduates do? Are they more or less likely to become entrepreneurs?”

I would have expected they were more likely to become entrepreneurial, but I was terrifically surprised that women seem to be substantially less likely than men to either start or join an entrepreneurial venture. The survey data showed that some commonly held beliefs just weren’t true.

After that, I began to focus on women and entrepreneurial choices. I became very interested in professional businesswomen’s careers and how their choices were different over time from those of men. I also wanted to move away from the obvious issues such as, “Oh, they have children. Perhaps they tank their own careers in order to either go on a Mommy track or leave the business world altogether.” I wanted to go much deeper than that while developing the courses, the executive programs, and the case research that I did while I was at Harvard.

It had never been my intention to be a gender specialist—not when I went to the doctoral program and not when I started on the faculty. In fact, I do not consider myself a gender specialist at all because I did not come to this topic from the perspective of the differences between men and women. I approached the study much more from the view of business and how business plays out in different ways. So, I came in from the other side of the equation, but it still brought me to a focus very much on courses for women MBAs, women executives, and led me to a very large case-writing initiative to create more teaching materials in which business leaders happen to be female. Eventually, all that became the genesis for my involvement in the Diana Project.

Ghaffari: When you surveyed the graduates, did you do it in one year or multiple years?

Hart: I did the surveys for five years. I followed the reunion classes, so they were graduates who were five, ten, fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five years out. I chose that approach because reunions are the times when alumnae usually think about coming back—they feel a little more nostalgic. They might be a little more willing to do a survey. I promised that if they did complete the survey, I would share the results with them at the reunion. So I got very good participation.

I discovered a great deal about how careers really transition. The surveys were separate snapshots of different people, rather than a longitudinal study following a single group throughout their life, which is research that is very valuable, but extremely time-consuming. One of my colleagues, John Kotter, actually does that. He’s followed the same group since the late 1970s. But my surveys were of a group of people who were queued up for their reunions. Each set of surveys was discrete, yet the findings were relatively consistent over the years.

In the beginning, I had no gender interest whatsoever. Gender was just one of the demographics or data points that I was collecting. The core of the study was about whether Harvard Business School was instrumental in their professional success—the answer, of course, was yes. Whether or not Harvard Business School was instrumental in their personal happiness, that answer was a little more mixed. I finally decided to sort this out.

Well over 90 percent of the men thought that Harvard Business School was a substantial contributor to their personal happiness and success. But the women were a little bit less so, and I was interested in why that was the case. Were they disappointed in their career opportunities? Were they no longer using their Harvard Business School education? This was interesting. I thought, “Oh, this is kind of surprising, so let me go out and talk to the people.”

Ghaffari: How extensive were your interviews with alumnae?

Hart: With the help of our alumni office, I set up interviews with small groups of women alumnae in San Francisco, New York, Washington, Chicago, and all over the country, trying to find out what were the stories behind these survey answers and to learn what the aggregated data was telling me. I really wanted to hear their personal case studies of what was going on.

The interviews told me and, ultimately the school, that perhaps our women alumnae needed some different kinds of attention. It wasn’t so much about professional success, but much more about how you make a contribution in life in a much broader way.

Women who attend professional schools are highly likely to marry or partner with another professional, which usually means they constitute a pretty high-income household. They are the fortunate people who have more choice about whether they’re going to work for money or not. Often, they are in a household where they could live on one income. And in the United States, I would guess that about 80 percent of our households have both partners working because they actually need to work and provide for their family. There is a subset of professionally trained and professionally employed people for whom it’s possible to live on a single income. It might be some sacrifice, but it’s feasible.

There’s good news and bad news about this. The good news is that it presents choices, and it usually is the woman who weighs the choices. In about 5 percent of the cases, I found that it was the man who made the choice to stay home and follow the woman’s career, but typically it’s the woman. Yet, the women are not really staying at home. They’re totally engaged in community and nonprofits, and they’re working at them just as hard as a business. They make that choice because it gives them a little more discretion about what hours they work and when they are engaged in the work.

Another situation might be when a woman decided to take time off or pull back from her career—staying engaged but doing the job maybe on a little less competitive basis. I asked if they planned to come back to the paid workforce. What did they do strategically to enable them to keep their connections alive and their knowledge of the industry and their network active? Essentially, how did they come back?

I discovered that these life decisions were quite strategic and that women should be thinking about them before they actually made the decision rather than thinking about them only in the heat of the moment when they make the decision.

So we introduced some courses at the business school originally for women to help them think about life planning as a part of career planning. It turned out that there were so many men who were interested so we changed the title of the course from Women Building Business to Building Business in the Context of Life. And when we did that, the enrollment went up to more than 50 percent male, attracting all students who were deeply interested in planning their professional career success as well as their personal life success. The class helped them focus on how to think about those options, develop early dialogues with intended partners, make choices about the industry or job channels, as well as how to negotiate these things before they actually were faced with the decision to do it.

Ghaffari: Was the original course the one that you developed with Professor Lynda Applegate in 1999? When did it change? Did she concur?

Hart: Yes, Women Building Business was the first course. It was renamed about 2002 or 2003. She was no longer jointly teaching it at the time that I converted the course to Building Business in the Context of a Life. When I took over the course on my own, maybe around 2002 or 2003, I had two men signed up whose wives were in the class. They said, “These issues are just as important to us. It was pretty hard for us to sign up given the course name, but not only are we interested, but there are a lot of others who are interested.” So we talked it over and decided it’s really about career issues, but it’s also about putting those choices in the context of the full life you want to live.

Ghaffari: You were also developing some executive education courses. Was the same thing happening in that environment—that men as well as women were interested?

Hart: In fact, the executive education courses were leading the way. Around 1996 or 1997, The Committee of 200 came to Harvard Business School. They are an international, nonprofit organization of more than four hundred, today, of the most powerful women who own and run companies. Most of The Committee of 200 are self-made women from the entrepreneurial side. They wanted to make a major philanthropic gift that would really assist and promote women in business and entrepreneurship, in particular.

They were thinking how best to invest $500,000 from their foundation in ways that might enable this. Not unlike my earlier decision to go into teaching, they tried to assess where they’d have the greatest impact. They considered fellowships, scholarships or a named professorship. I told them, “Each of those options will have influence. With scholarships from that amount of money, you could help maybe two or three women a year going through an MBA program. Endow a professorship and maybe the business school has some influence through that research. But, even though you endow a chair, you cannot actually control who gets it or what their perspective might be. There’s another way you could reach the broadest possible audience. That is, if you could influence the cases that are used in business schools, you could have a truly significant impact.”

The Harvard Business School publishing company totally dominates the dissemination of case studies to probably three hundred business schools around the world. Those cases are read by almost every business school student. If you could change, in some way, the perspective of students through the cases, you could really touch thousands and thousands of people every year.

When The Committee of 200 came to Harvard, Dean Kim B. Clark of the Business School said he would match their gift from the Dean’s Fund. So instead of merely $500,000, there would be $1 million devoted to the case-writing initiative to develop cases across the whole universe of courses that Harvard covered, with the common theme that the protagonists were all women. The issue was not about gender—it was about leadership.

These cases would add to the inventory of leadership studies, but the leaders would be women—authentic and extraordinary. In every way, this would be just a subtle signal: “Hey, women are in these places. They’re making these kinds of decisions.” Once you develop a lot of information about the persona of the case protagonist, you get a lot more insight into what issues women take into consideration that men don’t—or that men do take into consideration, but that issue never made it into the cases.

Ghaffari: How was Marjorie Alfus involved in the development of case studies?

Hart: She was the fire in the belly of The Committee of 200 because she said, “We have this foundation. We raise a certain amount of money every year from the members. We distribute it in bits and pieces. We really need to make a bigger statement.” Marjorie probably channeled her money through the foundation, but she was the lead giver. She stood up and said, “I’m going to put my money where my mouth is. We have to make this big gift. We have to make it in a very public way. We have to make a statement to the world that The Committee of 200 is not just interested in itself and its members. We’re interested in women in business everywhere.”

It was going to be the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of The Committee of 200, so Marjorie put up the first $250,000, and the next $250,000 came from the foundation.²

We were very successful in developing about seventy-five cases but, in the process, we also educated our faculty that these were important things to think about on the grid of issues that you consider when you’re building new case material. Another fifty to one hundred new cases were introduced into the curriculum beyond those actually funded by this initiative. Faculty were inspired by this initiative. They were writing cases under their own research budget but were now asking me, “Help me identify women candidates that I could study.” They’d give me the specs of what they needed—the financial services, this kind of a situation. Suddenly, they all wanted names of women for case studies.

Ghaffari: Are these kinds of women in leadership cases still being developed?

Hart: Oh, yes. In fact, I think in some ways there’s no need whatsoever for the initiative anymore. The initiative was not an endowment—a portion was spent every year. Each case probably cost between $25,000 to $30,000, so the million dollars was used up pretty quickly. But the impact is enduring.

Today, it is a very high priority, with our dean and faculty, to have cases that reflect the kinds of protagonists that you see in the classroom. As we look around the room, we see that 40 percent of the students are female and about 35 percent are international students, so our cases need to address situations in which those people play a major role.

Clearly we have migrated from thinking, “Well, this is nice to do.” Or, “It would be politically correct to do this.” Now we are at the point where we think, “Well, of course, this is what we do.”

Ghaffari: How did you get involved in the Diana Project?³

Hart: I had met the two original parties, Candida Brush and Patricia Green, at a doctoral research program in France in 1992 or 1993. We learned that we had very similar interests in the entrepreneurship area and that our research was quite complementary. I went to another research seminar where Patty and Candy were presenting another paper they’d written together. I was already working on a very similar paper. Afterwards I spoke to them, told them I was interested in the same topic and that maybe we could collaborate.

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So we wrote a paper together called “Toward A Research-Based Theory of Entrepreneurship” [1995]—actually a very popular paper even today. We discovered that we worked well together and had a lot of fun at the same time. As my work began to pick up at Harvard, beginning about 1997, focusing more on women, I brought them right into this. This was a whole field that nobody had explored in a systematic way, although Candy Brush had been involved in studying women in entrepreneurship since the early ’80s. Maybe it was because the field didn’t exist or maybe there weren’t enough people demanding information. So we started to think seriously about the topic and wrote another paper at a conference.

Two other women academicians whom we knew, Nancy Carter and Elizabeth Gatewood, said they too would like to join the group. They had done selectively different kinds of papers.

I have to say that a research group of five is hard to manage, but we decided to try it out. Since we were at five different schools, at least four of us were going to have to travel someplace in order to meet. We decided we’d all travel to Santa Fe because of Georgia O’Keefe. We wanted to work in a place where a woman’s persona dominated the atmosphere.

We spent a week, working for about six to eight hours every day, scoping out the questions that we had and what we could explore. How will we go about this? Of course, like the academics we were, we decided, “The first thing we have to do is understand everything that’s already been done so that we don’t recreate the wheel.” As our very first project, we outlined an exhaustive survey of the literature in which entrepreneurship and women might intersect, even though it might not be about women in entrepreneurship. We also looked very exhaustively at the gender research and assembled an annotated bibliography of all the existing work on women in entrepreneurship. That was our very first project.

Ghaffari: Was there anybody else, besides the five of you, interested in this subject?

Hart: We weren’t at all sure there was a high demand for it, but we found Magnus Erikson, managing director of the Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research Institute, a research institute in Stockholm, Sweden. He was very interested in our work and offered to publish our research if we would come to Stockholm and spend some time with the Swedish community, talking about entrepreneurship in general and focusing in particular on women in entrepreneurship. And that was the beginning of our big collaboration.

Now, when you have five academics—and luckily we had all been promoted, so it wasn’t as if we were jockeying for tenure and tenure review—the big question is always, “Whose name should go first?” I think our solution was very feminine. We decided to make it clear that no one person was the lead writer, but that all of the work that was produced was a collaborative effort from all of us.

We decided that we would always list our names in alphabetical order. And we would call ourselves the Diana group so that it was very clear this was not Candy Brush’s group, nor Myra Hart’s group, or Patty Greene’s. It wasn’t a leader and four followers, and not even a shifting leader with four followers. There were five people who worked together, and we called it Diana. We chose Diana, the goddess of the hunt, because we said our work was about women in the hunt for money since were primarily focused on women entrepreneurs. We named it Diana so that we didn’t have to go through five names every time, and we didn’t have to explain who was in charge.

For us, this just solved a lot of problems like “Who was the lead writer?” We didn’t need that—it wasn’t important to our careers at that point in our lives. If you’re a junior faculty member, it’s very important that you be the lead author. It wasn’t critical to our success as academics. We had already been over that hurdle.

Ghaffari: I’ve identified at least four books. One was Assuming Control. That was the first one.

Hart: Well, Assuming Control is not actually finished, I would say, so you won’t find that one. It was one that Candy, Patty, and I worked on separately. Because of my other commitments, it took a back burner for me. Meanwhile, Patty’s career had gone in a different direction. She became the provost at Babson, so that probably will never be anything more than an article.

Ghaffari: As a team, you’ve published a number of books.

Hart: Our very first one was the annotated bibliography. We have several collected works that are studies of the literature or collected from the Diana Symposium. We had Clearing the Hurdles and many research papers like “Women Business Owners and Equity Capital” and “The Gatekeepers.” Because of the way we work, sometimes one person would work on it, but everybody would get credit. I had far less of a hand in some of these books compared to others.

Ghaffari: What is the status of the Diana Project, currently, either for yourself or in general?

Hart: That’s a great question. All of our Diana research to that point had focused on women entrepreneurs in the United States—we just didn’t have the time or the resources to look at women entrepreneurs around the world. While entrepreneurs by their nature are not very global until they’ve grown to a sufficient size to cross international borders, we thought there were a lot of commonalities, globally. There also were a great many benefits if we could share research methods. So we decided to facilitate the international research by broadening our cooperative effort.

We moved into the global research space in 2003 when the first Diana International Conference was held in Stockholm, Sweden, at the suggestion of Magnus Erikson who said “Let’s think about hosting a conference for other researchers who are interested in women entrepreneurs.” The fact that about thirty men and women academicians came to the conference confirmed out belief that there was interest internationally.

The second international conference was held in 2004. The third in 2007 in Belfast, Ireland. The fourth in 2010 in Banff, Canada. By about 2007, we had really gotten a nucleus of very interested women and men from all around the world with a very robust group of leaders. When we started, just fourteen countries were interested, a large portion of them Nordic countries, but also from South Africa, Asia, and Australia.

Next year, the conference will be held in Perth, Australia. So the work continues on a global scale under the leadership of Diana International where Karen Hughes and Jennifer Jennings have embraced the leadership mantle.

On a personal level, the five of us have essentially disbanded as a research group. And I have retired, although I serve on the boards of directors of companies like Kraft Foods and Office Depot.

Ghaffari: Do you think that the issues change dramatically once you move from a North American business perspective into the international world?

Hart: Yes. There still are many people in Diana International who are US- and Canadian-based. They’re looking at issues that are similar and those that are different because the context of their economy is different.

Nordic countries are completely different situations politically, economically, and in the nature of business. If you’re in microfinance as compared to venture capital, there are totally different issues. But the people who are interested in these issues are learning across borders.

There are common concerns such as research methodology or what people are doing who are the next rung up on developing their economy. What’s the transition from micro-entrepreneurship in Africa or Latin America? How do you scale micro-entrepreneurship up to the next step? How about Central and Eastern Europe, where the economies have changed so radically in the past fifteen years? How receptive are those economies to entrepreneurship? Very receptive, it turns out. How much history do they have that they can actually learn from? Not very much. So, they have to learn what’s going on in other countries.

There is a great advantage for those who are part of Diana International in sharing knowledge. Even though the research that they’re doing might be focused very much within their own country, they are learning a great deal across country borders. Some of them collaborate, and some of them don’t. In any academic conference, you can attend and learn from others there, but you don’t necessarily have to do what they did.

Ghaffari: You, personally, have been involved in generating new businesses yourself, through programs like Springboard Enterprises. How did you get involved in that?

Hart: Springboard actually started in 1999. Kay Koplovitz was the inspiration for Springboard when she was chair of the National Women’s Business Council. She accepted President Clinton’s appointment to that position only under specific conditions: “I want to stimulate not just small business, but potentially large business. I want to focus on potentially venture-funded businesses led by women.”

She and Amy Millman, the executive director of the National Women’s Business Council, came up with the idea of Springboard. Their goal was to convince the naysayers that there were a lot of women who had the ability, the knowledge, and the ideas to run big and scalable businesses and, thus, they deserved the attention of the venture capitalist community.

When you talked to venture capitalists, they would say, “Our money is gender-blind. It just goes where the great opportunities are.” But, essentially, you could tell that they had some preset ideas about who they were seeing and how they were approaching the dialog.

I take no credit for Springboard. Like Staples, it came to me as an idea that was fully developed by somebody else. Kay and Amy had the idea to put out a call for women entrepreneurs to present their business plans. At the initial screening, maybe about five hundred business plans were presented. They looked at them every which way from Sunday and chose about the one hundred best in terms of the business concept. Then they brought those people in and talked with them as the talent behind the idea.

Finally, they chose about twenty-five whom they thought really had a track record as business leaders, good fundamental concepts, good management teams, and who credibly could start a really big, scalable business. They coached them well because many of these women did not have any experience in how to do the pitch, how to engage that conversation, how to do “the push and pull” required in the venture community.

Springboard held the first event in San Francisco at Oracle because Kay Koplovitz at the time was on the board there and was able to convince Larry Ellison that that was a good thing. When they planned to come to New England, they asked me if Harvard Business School would be willing to host it. That was a big step for Harvard Business School because they primarily host things that are Harvard-related. Harvard seldom gets involved with outside nonprofits that are supported by individual members of the faculty or the staff here. You can understand why—they could be inundated with these things.

Fortunately, our dean felt that this was very much in concert with our effort to reach out to women entrepreneurs and women in business. So, Harvard Business School hosted it for the first two years in New England, and I chaired it.

Ghaffari: Was the Diana research group involved in Springboard?

Hart: After me, the chairmanship stayed within the Diana group because of all our interest in women entrepreneurs. It went to Candida Brush who was then at Boston University. And the Diana group actually has kept close ties with Springboard because we used that as a research database, following up with all the women who had applied to Springboard or who had presented to Springboard to see how their professional life progressed and whether they got money, how they were doing in business, and what their next steps were. On an individual basis, we became involved with some of the entrepreneurs to try to help them by counseling them on an ongoing basis.

Ghaffari: You’ve been on a couple of the boards of entrepreneurial firms as well as major entities like Office Depot and Kraft. Are the roles significantly different?

Hart: It is a different focus. Now I’m more actively engaged in “things of the moment,” and I’m not so enmeshed in the research.

Ghaffari: Do you see any irony in your being a board member of Office Depot, a direct competitor to Staples?

Hart: Not really. I had not been involved with Staples at all after I left in 1990. I totally diversified my Staples portfolio the day that I walked out.

If you follow the industry, Staples and Office Depot tried to merge in 1996, but the Federal Trade Commission blocked it because they thought it would concentrate too much power in one business entity and that could result in increased prices for office supply products. The eighteen months of discussions, court review, and the failure of the merger had a greater impact on Office Depot than on Staples.

As for the industry, I’ve always believed in competition—the industry absolutely has to have good competition. Even in the days when I was an officer at Staples, I always said that Office Depot was one of the best things that ever happened to us because it made us so much better and it—absolutely—always was a good competitor. I was interested in the industry.

James Heskett, a colleague at Harvard Business School, was on the Office Depot board. In 2004, he asked me if I would consider going on that board. I personally considered it an enormous entrepreneurial opportunity in that Office Depot had been having some recovery difficulties, and I thought it was an opportunity to try to kind of get it back together.

Ghaffari: Was Office Depot your very first public company board?

Hart: Yes, but I had served on a number of private company boards for quite some time. Some of those come about through my professorship at Harvard, but certainly not all of them. For instance, Orchid Partners was started by Todd Krasner, who was at Staples. When he left Staples, he started Zoots, in which I was an investor. Later on, he started Orchid Partners as a venture fund. He invited me to be on his advisory board.

There’s a clear distinction between being on the board of directors vs. an advisory board. An advisory board is much easier, and you can serve on many more of them concurrently. You have no fiduciary responsibility, no legal liability. A board of directors is a much more demanding position. For my students, I would almost always be willing to be on their board of advisors, at least for the first two years—until they were able to field a board of directors. However, I did not want to take on the liability or the extent of responsibility as a member of their board of directors.

Ghaffari: When did you go on the Kraft Foods board?

Hart: December 2007. It was just made public today that Kraft is going to be splitting into two companies. That will be very interesting and really a big challenge.

Earlier, I’d been on the board of other big companies, including Royal Ahold N.V., a Dutch retail company in the food business. They own Stop & Shop and Giant Foods in the United States and Albert Heijn in the Netherlands, probably the single biggest supermarket chain there. The international experience was very interesting. When I joined Kraft, I had to leave the Ahold board because they are a big customer of Kraft, and you can’t be on both sides of the deal.

I was also on the board of Summer Infant, which is a much smaller local company that went public about four years ago. I was on the board to help them through the process of understanding governance in a public company and to help them figure out not only how to build a board but to help them conduct themselves in a much more professionalized way as a public company rather than a private company.

Also, I’ve done a host of nonprofits. I’m now on the board of the Smithsonian, which is really an extraordinary and a wonderful experience. I have been a trustee of Cornell and of Babson. Those were great opportunities for me to provide the business skills and oversights to a nonprofit that I learned elsewhere. It’s been great fun.

Ghaffari: As you look at women today in the professions, are you optimistic or pessimistic? What do you see are the great challenges? What do you see as the big picture?

Hart: Well, first of all I’m very optimistic because women are, by far and away, the better educated segment of our population. About 58 percent of the undergraduate degrees go to women, and about 50 percent of the graduate degrees go to women.

Many organizations and business and professional services firm now recognize that—because their talent pipeline coming in is so heavily weighted to the female side—they had better figure out how to make it attractive to those people to stay with them, perform well, and become leaders.

I am on the advisory board of Deloitte, and I think the world of the way that they are approaching this challenge. All of the accounting/consulting firms have figured out that if they are hiring 50 or 60 percent of the college graduates who are female, yet the women leave, then companies are going to have to find leaders from only 40 percent of their recruits. That doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s not smart. So instead, they want to make sure that they actually nurture, recognize, and develop the women in their workforce. And they want to make sure that they don’t have hidden barriers in either expectations or opportunities for the women. So I’m very optimistic.

On the other hand, I’m unhappy about how slowly it’s going. Actually, the number of women on corporate boards is still kind of pitiful—about 17 to 18 percent. In large part, women directors are drawn from the C-suite of existing businesses, and that’s an even worse number. So there’s still a really great deal of work to be done.

The other thing that frightens me a bit is that I don’t think that young women recognize the amount of challenge that still remains. I think that because of Title IX and some other initiatives, life is pretty smooth-sailing for young women coming through our K-through-12 experience in terms of opportunities and availability of the options for them.

Obviously, the undergraduate experience is dominated by women. Young women who got out into the workforce and even young women who come to get their MBAs are very optimistic that this same kind of equality awaits them going forward. Then they’re a little blindsided when they find out later—as a result either of their own internalized expectations about family or external expectations that it is difficult—that they have to make a greater effort, compared to their male colleagues, in order to really become very successful in their professional careers. The greater effort required is concentrated in how they will have to integrate all aspects of their lives because society still has programmed us to think about roles, expectations, and socialization for women that aren’t always consistent with a really high-flying, great career for women.

Ghaffari: When you were coming up your career path, it was quite difficult. Would you say you understood the challenges?

Hart: I totally understood it. I think that young women are not at all aware of the difficulty in managing themselves and some of the issues that may be external to themselves that they will also have to manage.

When women come into the workplace today, they’re given opportunities and then when they meet the challenges, they are surprised and shocked in many ways. They’re a little bit inured to the challenge by the fact that we’ve pretty much taken care of the early part. Not totally—I could point to the choices that young women make with regard to math and science that are still kind of lurking out there in the cultural expectations about what girls are good at and what boys are good at or what careers are attractive.

There are still some land mines and booby traps along the way, even though there are many people who are sincerely devoted to changing that. Sally Ride has a whole organization that is structured to keep young women—and young men as well, but especially young women—engaged in science and math at the junior high and high school level when many of them take themselves out of that game.

My research has not reached back to the K-through-12 experience. I am letting other people deal with that. I’ve been much more focused on the young women post-college and in their early career. That includes women in their forties who are returning to the workforce after a hiatus.