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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."
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