A Remarkable Life Story

01 Jun 2010

A Remarkable Life Story

Re: Lillian Lambert (MBA 1969); By: Sean Silverthorne

Topics: Information-Books Education-Business Education Education-Campus Life History-Business History Demographics-Gender Demographics-Race-General

Lillian Lincoln Lambert (MBA ’69) credits much of her business confidence and acumen to her years at Harvard Business School, where she was the first black woman to receive an MBA. But those two years, exhilarating and educational as they may have been, were not necessarily happy ones, she relates in her recent autobiography, The Road to Someplace Better: From the Segregated South to Harvard Business School and Beyond (Wiley). Her first-year class had just eighteen women (including herself) and five black men.

“No one at Harvard, including the faculty and the administrators, really knew what to make of me or what to do with me,” recalls Lambert, who received an HBS Alumni Achievement Award in 2003. Professors would pass her by in the halls, eyes cast downward. Recruiters seemed more interested in white students. Even at graduation, “many of the black students felt out of place.” It didn’t help her self-esteem when she fumbled her first cold call.

Not one to hold a “pity party,” Lambert joined an effort in 1967 to recruit black students from other schools (the number swelled 450 percent in the Class of 1970) and was a founding member of the African- American Student Union, both with the strong backing of Dean George P. Baker.

The Road to Someplace Better charts Lambert’s life from her humble upbringing on a Virginia farm (which didn’t get electricity until she was eight) to her founding of Centennial One Inc., a janitorial-services firm she built into a $20 million enterprise with 1,200 employees.

Her HBS education regularly gave her opportunities and helped her overcome challenges, Lambert relates. Early in her career she took over a struggling janitorial firm burdened with “every conceivable problem that a small business could have: unpaid withholding taxes . . . delinquent bank loans, unpaid vendors, overdue receivables, and other major cash-flow issues.” Her systematic, creative approach to overcoming obstacles would bring nods of approval from many HBS alumni, one suspects.

Lambert credits the late H. Naylor Fitzhugh (MBA ’33) with introducing her to business and pushing her toward HBS. Fitzhugh first mentored Lambert at Howard University, where he was a professor and she a student. “I came to appreciate the shrewdness in his approach to me,” she relates. “Just as in his teaching of the case method, he let me think that I was making my own decisions.”

This well-written book, leavened by healthy doses of self-deprecating humor, offers a unique perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of HBS in the late 1960s and is a tribute to the tenacity and spirit of its author.

Featured Alumni

Lillian Lambert

MBA 1969

Featured Alumni

Lillian Lambert

MBA 1969

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