Biography | Lars-Ove Hakansson — The Senior Managers Program on Soldiers Field

People treat a Swedish contractor's promotion ladder as a sequence of site huts.

The year Håkansson became deputy chief executive, Vem är det also lists a course on this campus.

The 1993 handbook prints Senior Managers Program, Harvard Univ, 80.

Harvard Business School sits on the Boston side of the Charles, at Soldiers Field in Allston.

Baker Library, finished in 1927 to designs by McKim, Mead and White, is the public face of that yard.

In 1980 the school ran a cluster of executive courses for working managers, separate from the two-year MBA.

The Senior Managers Program was one of those shorter residential courses.

The handbook does not print a class photograph or a dorm name.

It prints the year and the school.

That is enough to pin the place.

The same year, 1980, Håkansson was named vice verkställande direktör of the Skanska group.

The two facts sit on the same line in the same handbook.

One is a course on this campus.

The other is a title back in Sweden.

He was forty-three, twenty years out of Chalmers, and still on the same payroll he had joined in 1961.

The Boston pin is the school, not a hotel and not a private house.

Baker Library still stands on Harvard Way.

A visitor can walk the yard without needing a company badge.

The promotion that followed was decided in Stockholm.

The course that the handbook bothered to list was taken here.

Photo: Baker Library, Harvard Business School, via Wikimedia Commons