Anne Sempowski Ward
Corporate Board Director, Chairwoman, CURiO Brands – Minority Owner, WNBA Chicago Sky
When Anne Sempowski Ward was ten years old, her father bought her a ten-speed bike. Already tall—she was on her way to being six feet in height as an adult—regular bikes for girls her age were too small. So, her father bought her an adult-sized ten-speed. Except this one came in a box. Unassembled.
That didn’t strike Anne as an obstacle. “I’m sure there were instructions in the box somewhere,” she laughs. She never looked for them. Instead, she sat down and started putting the bike together herself. After she’d finished building it, “I rode off into the sunset,” she grins.
Assembling that bike was the moment Anne found her gift: Building things that work.
Anne was raised by her mom, a pediatric nurse who worked in a hospital for much of her career. That meant rotating shifts, often afternoons and midnights, which left her to sleep during the day. As the eldest child, Anne became responsible for a lot at a very early age. She was the one who got her younger siblings to school, fixed the toaster when it broke, unclogged the drain, and so on.
“When you grow up in a single parent household and also in Detroit, there’s a culture of grit,” says Anne. “Something needs to get done; you roll up your sleeves and make it happen. That has been my orientation from a young age.”
Which is sort of how Anne got herself to college at Duke University, more than 600 miles away. Most of Anne’s friends were headed to the University of Michigan, 45 minutes down the road. But Duke had an engineering program, it was someplace warm, and the catalog was “beautiful, glossy, picturesque” says Anne. She applied and was accepted without ever visiting campus. Or without having a way to get there in the fall. But an acquaintance and his uncle were driving to another school in North Carolina, and Anne asked if she could put some stuff in the trunk of their car and get dropped off in Durham. (Or nearby. She’d figure it out.)
At Duke, Anne majored in mechanical engineering; to her, it was the perfect combination of thinking and problem-solving. But it wasn’t without its challenges, and Anne almost failed her first year. One of the school’s deans even sent a letter to her mother saying that said he’d been forced to conclude Anne was unlikely to successfully complete an engineering degree program at Duke. These words didn’t deter Anne; instead, they fueled her. While her grades did not show her true academic abilities, she had always believed in herself and what she could do. Women were the minority in Duke’s rigorous mechanical engineering program, and others besides Anne were struggling. So, they bonded and began studying together, spending hours in the basement of the engineering library. “We said, ‘We’re going to help each other get through this,’” she remembers, “and we did.” Anne ultimately proved her dean wrong. She secured two coveted engineering internships with Proctor & Gamble during her sophomore and junior summers and graduated in four years with a permanent job offer in hand.
Anne chose to return to Procter & Gamble for her first full-time job out of school. They sent her to a manufacturing plant in rural Greenville, N.C., worlds away from inner city Detroit and picturesque Duke. Anne started as an intern and then received a full-time offer upon graduation. The plant made paper products—Always menstrual pads and Attends, an adult incontinence product. Most of the plant employees were men who’d worked the production line for 20 years or more. Anne’s first big project as a new process engineer was figuring out how to install new glue “guns” that would apply glue beads to the menstrual pads so that the “wings” stuck together as the pads rolled up for packaging. Thousands of pads per minute ran through the product line; she needed to make sure a glue bead problem didn’t slow down the process.
“The main goal for our entire team was throughput,” says Anne. “I’d never worked in a plant before, but I understood there was both a mechanical and human element to it working well. I knew I needed to build a human connection before trying to share what I knew technically. So, I listened. I was the youngest by a lot and one of only a few women engineers and Black women anywhere in the plant. And these men ended up taking me under their wing and teaching me everything I needed to know to succeed in that environment.”
Anne’s next career move happened when a trio of women leaders teamed up to catapult her forward. A visit to the plant by P&G executives got Anne wondering about market strategy for the products the plant made. She decided it was time to go back to business school. Her alma mater, Duke, accepted her, and Anne told her manager she’d be leaving in a few months. Not 30 minutes later, a senior woman leader at the plant stopped by Anne’s cubicle. “Have you ever thought about changing careers within P&G rather than leaving?” she asked.
They flew Anne to Cincinnati for the day for what she thought was an exploratory conversation, but she realized they were actually interviewing her. That afternoon, they offered her a job as an assistant brand manager at P&G. Her head spinning, Anne called Duke admissions and told them about the offer. The admissions officer said, “Wow. Those are the jobs we hope our graduates get. And you’ve already gotten it. So, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll defer your admission for two years. Come back when you’re ready.” Which is exactly what Anne did, earning her MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business a decade after her transition into marketing.
“All of the people who facilitated the process were women,” says Anne. “They ultimately changed the whole trajectory of my life, and they made it happen to support and retain another woman. That speaks volumes about the power of women mobilizing and rallying for other women.”
Anne went on to hold several leadership positions within P&G and later at Coca-Cola and Johnson Publishing. (“I was the Tampax brand manager at P&G at one point,” she laughs. “With men, that usually ended the conversation about what I did for a living.”) She got married. She built brands, led teams, finessed acquisitions, and orchestrated turnarounds.
And then another leadership role came along: Mother. Anne was nearly 40 and a chief operating officer at Ebony, Jet, and Fashion Fair in Chicago when she got pregnant. “My son was a surprise,” she says. “I wasn’t sure I would have children, so he was a welcome surprise. And I thought, ‘I’ve been doing this career thing for a while. I have to decide what I really want in this next phase for myself and my son.’”
What she chose surprised many. She left her high-profile COO position to work for herself as a consultant. A few colleagues told her she was making a big mistake for her career. Anne replied, “Hey, if this takes me off my career path, I was clearly on the wrong one—because I know this is the right decision for me.”
Today her son is a teenager, and she brings him with her often when she travels to Chicago to watch the 2021 WNBA Champion Chicago Sky play. Anne is now a minority owner in the Sky, along with a group of other women investors who took a stake in the team in 2023 to support the franchise’s development and take advantage of surging interest in women’s sports. “My son was born in Chicago, and I bring him,” says Anne, “because I want him to see the strength and evolution of women in sports. I also want him to experience firsthand the power of women in leadership.”
Anne is the Chairwoman at CURiO Brands and serves on four other corporate and higher education boards. She has defied the odds and “taken the road less traveled” throughout her career—a career created by following her passion for building companies and brands that work. She also continues to be an advocate for women in leadership, just as others advocated for her so many years ago. “There’s a belief I have,” says Anne, “about women supporting other women: If you show up in a room and you’re the only woman, make sure you aren’t the last. That’s why I chose to invest in the Sky and have championed women everywhere I’ve been. There are endless possibilities in this world for us. So, figure out how to bring more women with you.”