As Dr. Anne Jardim ’13HD turns 90, alumnae, colleagues, and friends reflect on the pioneering educator who, with the late Margaret Hennig ’62, created a new approach to management education — and taught generations of women to understand the organizations they were entering, trust what they knew, and lead.
Long before Dr. Anne Jardim ’13HD helped create a graduate management program for women, she learned something about entering places where she was not necessarily welcome.
In the early 1960s, as her native Guyana moved toward independence from Britain, Jardim became active in a newly formed political party. She quickly discovered a talent for public speaking and eventually became the only opposition member of the Senate.
She remembers the day she went to be sworn in. Leaders of a rival political party were sitting along the driveway to the public buildings where the legislature met, their legs stretched across her path.
Jardim kept walking.
“I don’t know what they thought I was going to do,” she recalled. She stepped over them one by one.
“One of them even winked at me.”
The political stakes soon became far more serious. During roughly three years in politics, Jardim said, she was arrested five times on charges that included leading illegal meetings and processions and seditious libel. The cases ultimately fell apart in court, but the threats were real. She carried a gun for protection. Her house was set on fire.
Eventually, she decided to leave politics. Her next destination would be Harvard Business School.
Finding Her Voice
An honors graduate of the London School of Economics, Jardim entered Harvard Business School’s doctoral program in 1964, earning her Doctor of Business Administration in 1967. Following her doctoral work, she joined Guyana’s diplomatic service, serving at the United Nations, becoming Guyana’s first ambassador to Brazil in 1969, and later serving as ambassador to Venezuela with dual accreditation to Chile in 1970. In 1972, she returned to academia on the Harvard Business School faculty.
Yet Jardim remembers feeling surprisingly unsure of herself when she first arrived at Harvard as a student.
She had no master’s degree and little formal background in business administration. Around her were men confidently using business terminology and slide rules she had never encountered.
“I didn’t know enough,” she said.
She experienced anxiety attacks in the classroom. Then came a marketing class.
Cold-called to analyze competing strategies for introducing a product, Jardim chose the option that would raise the price while promoting the product’s exclusive features. Her reasoning was economic: “What they’re trying to do, and it’s worth trying, is building inelasticity into the product and the price.”
The instructor, Jardim remembers, “stopped dead” and turned toward her. She heard a murmur from the men around her.
“I came out of the London School of Economics,” she said. “That was how I thought.”
After that, she found it much easier to speak in class.
It was a lesson Jardim would later help generations of women understand: knowing something and believing you have the right to say it are not always the same thing.
Harvard also brought her together with Margaret Hennig ’62.
A Partnership Begins
“I liked her enormously,” Jardim said of Hennig. “I thought that she was really one of the kindest people I’d ever met.”
They were also very different thinkers. Hennig, Jardim said, tended to approach problems through “the emotional context of what was happening and what was happening to the people involved.”
Jardim was more likely to ask: “What are they really trying to achieve? And why?”
“As a team, we really did work well.”
Their partnership deepened in the early 1970s when they were both at Harvard and advising women students. They saw women entering business education in greater numbers, but an institution and curriculum that had not fully adapted to their presence.
Business cases rarely featured women as successful leaders. Jardim pushed for cases centered on women and recalls being told there was no budget.
The disagreement with Harvard leadership escalated. Jardim recalls a dean warning her that if she took her concerns beyond the Business School, he would make sure she never worked in academia in New England again.
She went anyway.
By then, however, Jardim and Hennig had begun imagining something more ambitious than changing Harvard.
During that contentious period, they worked over a roll of brown wrapping paper in Hennig’s office, sketching out what a different kind of management education might look like. They ultimately left Harvard, which subsequently committed $25,000 to support the development of business cases about women.
Building Something Different
Their curriculum would include the traditional disciplines of management education — finance, marketing, accounting, operations.
Running alongside the core functions was another critical stream: organizational behavior viewed through the experiences of women.
Jardim and Hennig wanted women to learn to recognize what was happening around them without automatically assuming that every interaction was about them — to, as Jardim put it, take themselves out of the picture long enough to examine the organization itself.
“What, without me present in this context, are these people really doing?” Jardim said. “And what are they like with each other before they even pull me in?”
Functional knowledge alone, she believed, was not enough.
“You can learn all of the functional stuff that you need to,” Jardim said. But if a woman remained oblivious to the behavioral nuances of an organization dominated by men, “you essentially don’t have a chance.”
Their formal 1973 proposal to Simmons made a similar argument: the realities women encountered in organizations could not be adequately addressed within a traditional management curriculum.
Simmons President William Holmes supported the idea.
In 1974, Jardim and Hennig founded a 12-month Graduate Program in Management for women. Its first class of 36 graduated in 1975; seven years later, the program was formally incorporated as the Graduate School of Management (GSM).
The ambitions were considerable.
The facilities were not.
The program began in two former typing classrooms on the Simmons campus. Jardim remembers typewriter plugs across the floor, cramped quarters, and a common room with no furniture until students supplied it themselves.
Looking back, Jardim marvels that they survived those first five years.
Asked when she knew the idea would work, Jardim pointed to the very first class.
A Different Definition of Potential
Jardim and Hennig were challenging not only what women were taught, but assumptions about who belonged in graduate management education.
Their research and consulting work had introduced them to women with significant ability and experience whose careers had stalled inside organizations.
At New England Telephone, for example, they interviewed women in lower-level management roles who trained young male college graduates — and then watched those men advance beyond them and become their bosses. Jardim and Hennig wanted to understand why some women turned down opportunities for promotion and how women thought about the difference between having a job and building a career.
Those interviews, Jardim said, helped inform the research behind The Managerial Woman, the groundbreaking 1977 book she and Hennig co-authored about the barriers women encountered in business and the paths women took to leadership. The book became a New York Times bestseller, bringing their research and ideas about women in management to a national audience.
The Simmons program also admitted some women without undergraduate degrees, evaluating professional accomplishments and management potential alongside conventional academic credentials. From the beginning, non-traditional students were a deliberate part of the model.
Trustee and GSM alumna April Evans ’91 remembers how well many of them performed.
“The folks with highest honors,” she said, “invariably included the non-traditional students.”
For Evans herself, Simmons helped uncover abilities she had already been taught to discount.
Presence, Conviction, and ‘Swagger’
Evans entered the MBA program lacking confidence.
As an undergraduate, despite considerable mathematical ability, she had been discouraged from pursuing quantitative fields. Women, she remembers, simply weren’t expected to study economics, engineering, or physics.
At Simmons, she excelled in economics, quantitative analysis, and accounting, eventually tutoring fellow students.
That success became part of what Evans calls the platform on which she built confidence — and, eventually, “swagger.”
“I lacked a lot of confidence going into the MBA program,” Evans said. Anne, Margaret, and the faculty “had a way of holding us all accountable — but in an oh-so-positive way.”
For Evans, that swagger was rooted in situational awareness — “understanding the importance of reading a room” and “knowing what to do with that information.”
At 90, Jardim is careful about the word. Expertise and mastery, she says, can carry their own kind of authority, but she is wary of the performative aspects of organizational life.
“If by it, people mean confidence,” Jardim said, “that’s different.”
Confidence, to Jardim, is “the confidence that comes from knowing something and being willing to speak up, or ask a question.”
“That’s the biggest one of all,” she said. “Curiosity.”
Read the Environment
The idea of reading the environment surfaces again and again among the women who learned from Jardim and Hennig.
Marcia Katz ’77 remembers learning that working hard was not enough. Culture mattered. Relationships mattered. Networks mattered.
“There were strategies,” she said.
Katz also saw how differently men and women sometimes approached those networks. She remembers Jardim and Hennig describing male Harvard students gathering before class to exchange ideas about cases while women tended to work alone.
“The women worked on their own!” Katz recalled.
Women, she learned, were more likely to view success or failure as an individual verdict: “I win or lose by my own effort.”
The GSM demanded something different.
Its famously intense workload made study groups essential. Evans remembers learning that no student could do everything herself; success required trusting other women to master their piece of the work and share what they learned.
“For those of us who were used to being individual achievers, it was quite a lesson,” she said.
Maggie Keefe ’88 carried that lesson into a career that eventually included leading global technology teams. The experience shaped her belief that successful organizations could not be built around “lone soldiers.”
Other lessons stayed with her as well: read the environment, do your homework, trust your gut — and ask whether the problem you have been given is really the problem that needs to be solved.
For Katz, the effect of the GSM was easier to summarize.
“It changed my life.”
The Teacher Behind the Lessons
The women who worked with Jardim describe someone demanding, direct, funny, and deeply invested in other people’s growth.
“She expected you to take yourself seriously and to do your best work,” Katz said.
Ruth Shuman, who spent more than a decade at Simmons in career services, external affairs, and teaching — including as Associate Dean for External Affairs at the GSM — remembers Jardim’s expectations just as clearly.
“A lot of women are non-confrontational,” Shuman said. “That’s not true for Anne.”
But Shuman also remembers Jardim and Hennig promoting her, challenging her professionally, and defending faculty and staff when they believed people were being treated unfairly.
“She epitomizes leadership,” Shuman said. “You knew who was in charge, but she expected me to be in charge of my area.”
“Anne and Margaret were invested in my career,” she added. “There’s no question about it.”
And then there was the humor.
Katz remembers laughing and singing little ditties with Jardim and Hennig while doing serious work.
Shuman remembers accompanying Jardim to a television interview, emerging to discover her car had been towed, and ending up with her boss in the backseat of a police cruiser on the way to retrieve it.
Once they had the car back, Jardim — who Shuman says had a famously poor sense of direction — pointed toward the Prudential Tower.
“Head that way!”
They got lost.
A School Finds a Home
As the program grew, Jardim and Hennig needed more space.
They briefly considered acquiring a former convent for a middle-management program, but within days of Simmons placing an option, the property went to another institution.
Then Garland Junior College reached out. Facing severe financial strain, Garland had decided to offer its property to a women’s institution.
Jardim and Hennig were ready.
“We had everything laid out in the most professional way,” Jardim recalled — the curriculum, catalog, faculty, and plans.
Simmons presented a clear, fully developed vision for a growing graduate management program for women.
Garland chose Simmons.
The Back Bay properties became the GSM’s longtime home and, decades later, helped make possible a new home for the School of Management on the Fenway campus. Jardim herself later reflected on the journey from “two makeshift rooms” to the Garland buildings and then to the School’s purpose-built home.
The episode neatly illustrates much of what Jardim and Hennig taught: understand the environment, recognize an opening, and be prepared when opportunity arrives.
Lessons That Endure
Nearly 50 years after the publication of The Managerial Woman, some alumnae find its continued relevance bittersweet.
Does the book still apply?
“I wish it didn’t, but it does,” Evans said.
Shuman’s answer was similarly emphatic.
“Sadly, I do.”
Women have made significant gains in leadership, she said, but many of the questions Jardim and Hennig raised about networks, authority, access, and advancement have not disappeared.
Jardim herself still emphasizes the fundamentals: observe, interpret, remain curious, and ask questions.
Recently, while reviewing architectural plans, she noticed several spaces marked “ZOO.”
She didn’t know what that meant.
“Would you please explain the zoo?” she asked.
People laughed.
“I’m dead serious,” Jardim replied.
The architect explained that ZOO meant “zone of opportunity” — space left intentionally flexible.
Others around the table, Jardim noticed, seemed relieved.
They hadn’t known either.
They simply hadn’t asked.
For Jardim, that is confidence: not performance or bravado, but knowing when you have something to contribute — and being secure enough to admit when you don’t know.
“Is it reasonable that I should know the answer to this?” she asks herself. If it isn’t, ask.
Another First
More than five decades after Jardim and Hennig began imagining a different kind of management education, Simmons is asking again where it can do something distinctive.
Under Astrid Sheil, Dean of the Simmons School of Management, the School has launched a new Master of Science in Management (MSM) with concentrations including Business and Leadership in Women’s Sports — the first graduate degree in the nation dedicated to the business of women’s professional sports.
“The Simmons School of Management has a rich legacy of preparing students to lead across industries,” Sheil said when the program was announced. “We are thrilled to build on that tradition with this new, distinct pathway focused on the business of women’s professional sports at this moment of rapid growth in the field.”
For Sheil, the connection to the School’s founders is personal as well as historical: before launching the sports concentration, she consulted Jardim and received her “full-throated support.”
Jardim sees a striking similarity in the energy required to build something new. She remembers that she and Hennig had the support of President Holmes but still faced resistance as they worked to establish the original program.
Evans sees the same thread.
Jardim, Hennig, and Holmes “had the courage to do something that had never been done before,” she said. “There was no marketing test for this.” What drove them was their understanding of women in business and their conviction that something different was needed.
The circumstances today are different. So are the industries and opportunities. But the core instinct remains: see something emerging, understand what women will need to lead within it, and build before someone else does.
At 90
On September 17, Anne Jardim turns 90.
The people who know her use strikingly similar language to describe her.
“Brave and groundbreaking,” Katz said.
A “visionary educator” and “pioneering scholar,” Shuman said.
But Jardim’s own attention remains less on how she will be remembered than on what women still need.
Asked what gives her hope, she returns to confidence — not swagger for its own sake, but the deeper confidence that allows women to trust their abilities and, as Jardim put it, “feel at peace with themselves” and the world in which they live.
That confidence, she believes, can affect everything from creativity to how families develop. And it begins early — with the messages children receive at home and at school about what they are capable of becoming.
This year, Simmons is launching an effort to establish an endowed fund bearing the names of Jardim and Hennig to support students, faculty, and programs within the School of Management.
It is a fitting continuation of what the two women began more than half a century ago. They taught women finance and marketing, strategy and operations, but they also taught them to see what was happening around them: to understand power, question assumptions, rely on one another, and trust their judgment.
And when they didn’t know something, to ask.
At 90, Anne Jardim still does.