Chicago Booth Magazine Distinguished Alumni Awards 2020

I’m Jenny Scanlon. I graduated from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1992. I was very young when I applied to Booth, I was 22 years old. I would not trade that opportunity to have joined this, you know, storied institution at that young age for anything.

Last year I had the opportunity to take my dream job, CEO and president of UL. I love UL because it draws upon the science, the math, the engineering, the technology of my background. All of those elements that Booth trained me for.

I grew up in the Chicagoland area. My father was a teacher and a football coach. He revered University of Chicago, and that was in my blood. When I had the opportunity to matriculate at University of Chicago Booth, my father was proud, and I was just so excited to be part of this organization, this storied university, that I had heard about my entire life.

But what’s evolved is the deep connections that I make immediately upon meeting people from Booth. The neat thing about it is we were all trained in that deep, like-minded quant approach to thinking about the numbers, thinking about the data, and boiling business down to its essential elements of what matters, and what problems we really need to solve.

When I think about the students of the future, and the role that they can play, especially being connected to Booth, I would advise them to take the jobs that other people don’t want, and solve the problems that are the really tough problems. There is still an opportunity for more women to seize the day and understand that they can do the math, and they can be extraordinarily successful.

Receiving the Distinguished Alumni Award is, first of all, incredibly humbling. When I think about the people who have walked the halls of Booth, and I think about the company that I keep, it’s really pretty amazing to be part of this group.

It also made me so proud to call my dad and tell him what I had achieved, and the recognition that the university that he’s revered for his 87 years of life has bestowed this honor upon me.

I am Assaf Wand, CEO and cofounder of Hippo Insurance. I graduated Booth at 2005.

The biggest joy that you have in entrepreneurship is that you choose who you work with, you choose what you work on, and you build the culture that you want to work with.

I think different people go to business school for a different reason. I wanted to experience corporate America and I thought that Chicago Booth enabled me to do that.

One of the things that I like about Chicago Booth is that it elevates inspiration level. The Chicago Approach for business, basically teaching you, you know, how to solve something rather than what’s the solution for something.

Booth enhanced my curiosity for learning. I find it, it’s a mature school. It’s an independent-thinking school, which is very much aligned with how I want to run my life. It lets you choose your own classes; that fits me perfectly to actually customize my learning experience.

I’m very proud and honored to win the Distinguished Alumni Entrepreneurial Award. It’s something I’m, you know, never envisioned, never thought of, especially being a student. It was something on a pedestal, fills you with pride, the fact that I’m getting this award.

What I’ve accomplished, what I’ve done, how proud I am at Hippo Insurance and the people that we work with. If you know what you want, you know what the track, you value something which is more quantitative, more data, more warm, and you know, and debate and intellectual curiosity kind of place, Chicago Booth, that’s a perfect place for you.

My name is Cathy Krieger. I graduated from Booth in 1991. I’m the president and CEO of the Children’s Place Association in Chicago. One of the things we say about ourselves is that we’re champions for Chicago’s most vulnerable children.

The reason that I chose Booth was that I knew Booth would be a very challenging, kind of hard-edged school. And I thought that I already had the skills to kind of work with people, I already had a lot of the sort of softer skills, and for me it was really important to get those other skills, and to get them in the place that I had heard was the most challenging school in the country.

I think the alumni network is a huge resource for all of us who are alums. To know that there’s this other group of people who’ve had the same experiences, the same education, and are really well placed throughout the corporate world and nonprofits, really just a wonderful network to tap into.

What Booth did for me, was really equip me to run a community-based nonprofit, struggling with some of the most challenging problems that face us in our society today. There was a discipline and a knowledge base that I was able to get at Booth that has been invaluable for the last 30 years. A lot of times when we turn the news on at night and when we’re seeing the different things that are going on in our city and in the world.

But it’s hard to even figure out where to get started. It’s easy to just think, “Oh, this is just too hard, I don’t know what anybody could possibly do about it.” And I guess the challenge that I would put out for Booth students is, you guys are the A game. OK, if the people who are the A game can’t figure it out, then we’re doomed. So if you’re a Booth student and you want to tackle hard problems, you should be looking for organizations like the Children’s Place Association to be involved with.

Receiving the Distinguished Alumni Award is a huge honor, but I think more importantly it’s a tremendous validation of the hard work of the Children’s Place Association. And it is such an honor for all of us to be recognized by the most prestigious business school in the country.

Hi, I’m Brian Niccol, Booth graduate 2003, and currently I am the chairman and CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill.

What I would tell leaders, future leaders, is, “Look, if you commit yourself to doing the right thing, you’ll be making the right kind of impact.” People don’t follow spreadsheets, they follow the individual. And if the individual is seen as a person that cares, and they care about doing the right thing, you can have a tremendous impact in so many different areas.

One of the reasons that Booth was such a great experience for me is, a lot of what I learned at Booth I still put into application today. And I’d say just at the high level, you know, Booth gets categorized as a highly analytical place.

I think what people miss, though, is the analytics really are only as good as your intuition on how you synthesize that information. One of the things that I’ve always really pushed in myself is, “Let’s make sure we get the facts, so that we can analyze the facts,” but if you don’t have the intuition and the ability to synthesize that information, all you’re going to do is be stuck in analysis.

One of the things that was great at my time at Booth is, it was like, “Let’s get the facts, let’s analyze the facts,” but then you’ve got to make a decision and use your intuition on how you’re going to behave with those facts and where you’re going to go with those facts.

I use that every day. I remember when I first got accepted to Booth and I was like, wow, this is going to be amazing, and it turned out to be the case. You know, the professors were outstanding, my classmates were outstanding, and to be recognized from that community is just really special. I think it’s something that frankly, when I first went to Chicago, I remember reading all the names on there, and now I’m kind of like, “Jeez, I’m going to have one of those names on there,” so it’s kind of crazy (chuckles), it’s great.