Simmons Gift
Washington Post's Graham Speaks
Project Outreach
HBS Show
Rauner Honored
Wanted: Leaders for the New Millennium
New Exec Ed Building
Investigation Leads to Sanctions, Recommendations

Simmons Family Endows Professorship

The only way to truly appreciate what you have is to work for it," says Roy W. Simmons, the 82-year-old chairman of Utah-based Zions Bancorporation, one of the most successful bank holding companies in the country. Simmons speaks from experience. From modest beginnings, he and his wife, Elizabeth ("Tibby"), have worked hard to establish a fulfilling life that centers on work, family, church, and community. And they have passed their values along to their six children, four of whom have earned MBAs at HBS.

Like their parents, the Simmons children have reached high levels of success. They value and make time for family life, believe in hard work, and support their communities. The family recently established a fund to create the Roy and Elizabeth Simmons Professorship of Business Administration at HBS.

In announcing the chair, which will support faculty in the area of banking and finance, Dean Kim B. Clark noted, "Roy and Tibby Simmons have been wonderful role models for their children, community, and business associates. It is a privilege for HBS to have a chair that recognizes this truly amazing family."

A Deep Regard for the School

Commenting on the family's gift, the Simmons siblings cited a deep regard for the School and a desire to pay tribute to their parents. "We wanted to give back to an institution that means a lot to us," says Harris H. Simmons (MBA '80), who succeeded his father as president of Zions Bancorporation in 1986. "Our experiences at HBS were incredibly important in shaping who we are as businesspeople," echoes David E. Simmons (MBA '85), president of Simmons Family, Inc., a firm established by Roy Simmons in 1978 that owns and operates radio stations in the western United States.

"The School has been a significant factor in our individual success and in our success as a family," notes L.E. Simmons (MBA '72), founder of L.E. Simmons & Associates in Houston, which manages a private equity fund that invests in the oil service industry. "We all believe in and support what Kim Clark is doing at the School," adds Matthew R. Simmons (MBA '67), an active HBS volunteer who is president of Houston's Simmons & Company International, an investment bank specializing in the oil service and equipment industry.

"Education has always been very important to our parents," says Julia Simmons Watkins, who has raised eight children and is active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Julia and her sister, Elizabeth ("Liza") Simmons Hoke, also actively support higher education. "It's clear, now more than ever, that education is the key to the future," says Liza, who works in real estate in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and has three children. All six Simmons siblings graduated from the University of Utah.

Entrepreneurial Spirit

Perseverance in the face of adversity and an entrepreneurial spirit are the hallmarks of the Simmons family's success. Roy Simmons was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1916 and adopted at birth. Roy's time with his adoptive parents was short: at the age of eight his mother died, and his father sent him to live with family friends in Salt Lake City.

Elizabeth Ellison was born in Layton, Utah, in 1916. Her grandfather, Ephraim Peter ("E.P.") Ellison, who crossed the plains in a covered wagon as a young boy, was an entrepreneur who founded a major ranching enterprise, a sugar factory, a flour mill, a bank, and a general store. Tibby's father, Laurence, headed one of E.P.'s many successful endeavors, the First National Bank of Layton.

Roy and Tibby met when they were students at the University of Utah during the Great Depression. Roy had to drop out of school when he ran out of money during his junior year, but Tibby graduated with a degree in speech and English. They were married in 1938, and Tibby went to work for her father at the First National Bank of Layton. Roy, who left a $14-a-week job as a copyboy at the Salt Lake Tribune to try his hand at selling life insurance, eventually joined the bank as well. "My dad hired him because he was around so much," laughs Tibby, who left her job two weeks before their first child, Julia, was born.

Roy thrived at the First National Bank of Layton, and in 1949 he became the youngest state banking commissioner in the United States when he was appointed to that position in Utah. He left this post in 1952 to organize the Bank of Utah in Ogden. A year later, he became president of the Lockhart Company, a consumer finance firm in Salt Lake City.

In 1960, Roy and two colleagues purchased controlling stock in Zions First National Bank from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Three years later Zions and Lockhart merged to form Zions Bancorporation, and Roy was soon elected chairman of the board and CEO. For the next 22 years, he led Zions on an ambitious program of expansion, increasing the bank's assets from $150 million in 1964 to more than $3 billion in 1986 and expanding the bank statewide. In 1985, under Roy's leadership, Zions bought Nevada State Bank in Las Vegas, setting a precedent for the bank's continued growth into other states. Today, Roy is still active in the bank; in addition to serving as chairman of Zions Bancorporation, he is chairman of the executive committee of Zions Bank.

Tibby's work over the years has focused on her family and church. While raising six children in a three-bedroom house kept her busy Ñ "just coordinating the schedule for our one bathtub was a full-time job," jokes L.E. Ñ Tibby devoted much time to working with young members of the Mormon Church. She also played a major role in the restoration of several historic buildings of interest to the church, including Salt Lake City's Lion House, the original home of Brigham Young.

Family Business

In 1986, Roy turned over the presidency of Zions Bancorporation to Harris, who, at 32, had already spent half of his life in banking. "When fathers and sons work together it is usually either wonderful or disastrous," notes Harris, who became CEO of Zions Bancorporation in 1990. "In our case, it has really been wonderful. I attribute 90 percent of our success to my father."

Today, Zions Bancorporation is a multistate banking and financial services firm with 250 offices in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and California. The company has received rave reviews from industry experts for its financial performance. It has built specialized lines of business in institutional investments, municipal finance, and small-business lending. A regional leader in technological innovation, Zions recently became the first U.S. bank to receive approval to issue digital certificates, an application that will, for example, enable consumers to electronically file legal documents, order prescriptions, and renew loans.

While Harris and David, both of whom live in Salt Lake City, have worked most closely with their father, all of the Simmons children began their education with their parents. "Growing up, we would sit around the dinner table and talk about business, not sports," says Harris. Roy and Tibby's six children have taken different paths to a multitude of accomplishments, and they attribute their success to one overriding influence. As Matt says, "All six of us got a great business education from Mom and Dad. Four of us were lucky to be able to round out their teachings by going to HBS."

Katharine Graham Offers Advice on Leadership

Introduced by HBS Dean Kim B. Clark as a business leader who "exemplifies the character and values that we hold dear at Harvard Business School," Katharine Graham, chairman of the executive committee of the Washington Post Company, spoke before an enthusiastic Burden Hall audience in early April.

Graham retraced the unusual path that brought her to the top position at the Washington Post in 1963. It is a story that she chronicled in Personal History, her best-selling memoir that, one week after her HBS visit, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography. The daughter of Wall Street financier Eugene Meyer, who acquired the newspaper in 1933, Graham graduated from Vassar and the University of Chicago and cut her teeth as a journalist in San Francisco before accepting a position as a reporter at the Post in 1938. In 1940, she married Philip Graham, a Harvard Law School graduate who was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

When, after World War II, Meyer left the Post to become the first president of the World Bank, he asked his daughter's husband to take over as the paper's publisher. "Neither I nor anyone else even considered that I would take a management role in the company," Graham said. And two years later, when Meyer transferred ownership of the paper, his son-in-law received two-thirds and his daughter one-third of the shares. "My father believed that no man should ever have to work for his wife!" quipped Graham, who eventually left her reporter's job at the Post to look after their four children and coordinate the couple's active Washington social life.

Her life changed abruptly in 1963, when Philip Graham committed suicide after a struggle with manic depression, and she took control of the business. "I had inherited the controlling shares of a company I cared desperately about," Graham noted. "I had participated, at least by osmosis, in the long struggle my father and my husband had waged to make the Post a success. But I was a long way from becoming an effective executive and leader. That was something I had to learn by doing."

With help from friends such as feminist Gloria Steinem and investor Warren Buffett (a major Post shareholder), Graham gradually gained the personal confidence and management skills that enabled her to build the Washington Post Company into a highly diversified and financially successful business. Under her leadership, the paper provided readers with courageous and award-winning editorial coverage of controversial issues such as the Watergate scandal and the Pentagon Papers. To succeed, not only did Graham have to acquire managerial expertise in fairly short order, but she had to overcome what she termed the "female baggage"- including feelings of inadequacy, a tendency to dwell on her own mistakes, indecisiveness, and a constant desire to please others - that she brought to the job.

Graham, who is 81, dismissed the idea that she is a role model, explaining to the HBS audience, "Your generation of women has to meet much higher expectations than I did." But based on her own career, Graham did offer five personal qualities that are essential for enduring leadership: strong personal values; self-confidence; courage and tolerance in the face of failures; the ability to delegate to the right people; and the willingness to make changes when changes are necessary. Finally, she added, "Caring about and loving what you do for a living will make you feel like the luckiest person in the world."

June 1998 Table of Contents: Table of Contents Salute to 1998 Diversity and Community Alumni Resources Profile Q & A Theory & Practice Update