Chicago Booth Magazine Distinguished Alumni Awards 2017

John S. Watson:
My parents always talked to me about, "You only have one reputation," and so it's been wonderful to join Chevron and find those same characteristics here.

John S. Watson:
There are two reasons why I went to the University of Chicago. The first of course was Milton Friedman. This was the heyday of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, he had just retired by the time I arrived. The other reason, of course, was the way the University of Chicago approached education. It very much approach problem-solving by teaching you the disciplines. And so, you'd learn accounting, you'd learn statistics, you'd learn behavioral science, and you would be responsible for integrating those into solving problems. And that framework that Chicago gave me enabled me to take uncertain facts, uncertain times, and meld them together to try to make a business decision that works for the company.

Pat Yarrington:
I think John is a very effective communicator, and he's a very effective ambassador for the company, and frankly for the industry at large. He has a phenomenal capability to take a very complex topic and boil it down into language that everybody can understand, put forward his data points, make a compelling argument.

John S. Watson:
In 1980 was around the time of the Iranian Revolution, and so oil was topical as it is today. And I got very interested in the oil industry for its geopolitics, for the macroeconomic implications of the industry, the technology that's involved. It just seemed like it was a broad and critical industry for the world, and I got very interested. And so I read a lot and then interviewed broadly in the oil and gas business and elsewhere at that time and wound up joining Chevron.

Mike Wirth:
Well, I think John marrys up his intellect, his belief in free enterprise, and in markets and in technology and competition, with a humanity that makes him approachable. When John challenges the people that work for him, it's never personal, it's always business. And so, as he pushes people to be better, to learn, to grow, to push themselves, it's always coming from a place where he's looking to make the company stronger and he's looking to make you stronger as well.

John S. Watson:
So what Chevron has afforded me is the opportunity to do many different things over time. So, I started in finance, but I've done many other things. And just as I was getting anxious as if I wanted to do something different, I would be moved on to something that was very different than what I had been doing. It was all in the same industry, but it allowed me to branch out and do different things I never would have thought I would wind up in the job that I'm in, and it's because I was tested in those different areas.

Joe Laymon:
The commitment to the development of our employees that is far superior than most other leaders. He just doesn't want you to come here and be content with just doing a job, he wants you to come here and be content in doing a better job, and doing something better for yourself and your family.

John S. Watson:
I think I was conditioned to ask questions and be analytical in my thinking at the University of Chicago. As time went by, I had to do it to survive in Chevron because it's such a big company, such a complex business. And you can't know everything, but there is somebody that knows everything inside the company. So I learned as time went on, instead of being the answer man all the time, to try to be the one that's eliciting information from people and extracting the right information and really listening and hearing what they say so you understand what they're contributing. It's very fashionable today to talk about inclusiveness, and the true meaning of that is making sure that everyone can contribute to their fullest. And so, and if you're going to allow people to contribute to their fullest, you better be good at letting them and asking the questions so they can do a particularly fair job like mine.

John S. Watson:
I'm currently very interested in education, and particularly primary education. Chevron does a great deal around STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math. As we look to hire young people to take positions in our company, there's just an increasing shortfall, particularly amongst underrepresented minorities in some of the technical disciplines. So at our company, and personally, we work very hard to try to foster more involvement for youth in those fields so that we have a pool of people to draw from. I'm very grateful to the university. It taught me a way to think. And I didn't really realize it until my later years, that the way I would dissect problems, the way I would take on issues, including the public position of our company in many areas, is really based on some of the thinking skills that I developed at the University of Chicago, and I truly believe that.

Amy Fershko Ellis:
The University of Chicago really teaches you to think about a situation in the most strategic terms. That's what I got from the business school there. They really taught you the strategies, the thinking, the "why" behind what you're supposed to be doing. And that's what I found most helpful in my career as I move forward, is the ability to, with courage, challenge assumptions and be able to make a compelling case for an interpretation.

Paul Gilbert:
Amy is a way-out-of-the box thinker; she doesn't know where the box is. She has processing power that is rare. She can find the seam in any problem and work her way to the core of it. She's never going to give up. She will never quit. She'll never be defeated, and it's an extraordinary experience to work with someone who looks at business as white canvas to do extraordinary painting with, namely, innovation.

Amy Fershko Ellis:
The mission of MedAvante has evolved over the past 15 years from a much more narrow, close-in solution to a problem, to pulling the lens back. And as we pulled it back, provided a solution that actually worked to produce more of a benefit to society as a whole. I just recovered from cancer two years ago, went through the whole thing: surgery, chemo, radiation. I remember thinking to myself, I haven't done what I wanted to do yet. I do not want to die just having done this, and it really is trite, but it's true. At the end of the day, it's not about the dollars, it's did you enjoy doing what you're doing? Did you help other people enjoy doing what they're doing? Did you make a difference in their lives?

Angela Wilmer:
She battled cancer, and over that year and a half, there wasn't one day where she was not positive. And I remember watching her day after day, and I couldn't imagine being in her shoes and coming to work every day and still having that attitude of "We can conquer this." But as I think back on it, that same personality that drove her to move this company forward was the same attribute that caused her to overcome cancer.

Amy Fershko Ellis:
I think the myth of people coming up with great ideas in their garage is just that, a myth. Having been through it myself, I can't even begin to conceive of being an entrepreneur without a team around you who represents ... it balances out. Teamwork is everything. Everything. We came up with a different product that wasn't as comprehensive a solution, but it still provided a major benefit, and that's when we broke into Alzheimer's. And we did it by also looking at the fact that the product was something that we had been using internally just for ourselves. When you do centralized ratings all over the world, and you have to coordinate different time zones, languages. We came up with the first digital electronic source collection of data, so everything was in the cloud.

Amy Fershko Ellis:
It could be easily monitored remotely. We got rid of all the paper and it did resource allocation. It was a linear programming problem that I think even our professors at Chicago couldn't resolve. We looked at that and we said, "Hmm, wouldn't everybody else like this product?" And that was the essence of the innovation. As we took an internal technology that gave us a huge competitive edge, we fixed it up so it could be pushed out to laymen using [it] all over the world, and we gave it to the stakeholders that had been disintermediated before. The sites, the principal investigators, and say, you use this, you will be better raters, and it blew the top off the market.

Paul Gilbert:
Leading innovation is one of the most perilous decision-making environments. The innovator has to drive through ambiguity, complexity, insufficient information. Amy has this very powerful systematic thinking process that enables her to cut through to the core of any issue or problem no matter how seemingly unresolvable it is.

Amy Fershko Ellis:
I think my leadership style really works best in this environment. I am your prototypical round peg in a square hole. I'm a very forceful person. I'm very energetic person. I have very low tolerance for conventions and the typical way in which corporations run, and people who are attracted, they love it. To the large extent, people who are attracted to an entrepreneurial company are seeking to escape the constraints and rigidity of modern corporations where they don't think they have thrived. I can't begin to tell you how honored I am by this recognition. I thought I was doing it invisibly for decades, and I just can't tell you how honored I feel and validated. That's the word for it. I really feel validated.

Pedro De Andrade Faria:
Previous to Booth, I had no experience outside of Brazil, and so spending time in Chicago gave me a much broader perspective globally. I had the opportunity to meet brilliant people, people from all over the world, and this has really helped me as I mature in my career, and it became essentially a global perspective.

Stacey Kole:
He's the CEO of a global enterprise. He is an inspiration to our students. He has given tirelessly of his time to help us fundraise and to build the Booth brand. I can't think of anyone that I've interacted with who is more deserving of this award than Pedro.

Artur Tacla:
He's [one of the most] extremely generous guys that I have seen my whole life. He is amazing in creating context for learning and growth for business and people, human development, and he's the best leader that I have seen my whole life that held a space for people to act and grow. He's challenging himself all the time. He's very brave. He's all the time trying to learn, I admire him a lot.

Pedro De Andrade Faria:
My experience at booth really gave me the confidence I needed to engage in all my career challenges as well as life challenges. That curiosity, that obsession for data, that obsession for intellectual rigor was really an essential part of who I am today. I'm very thankful to Booth for really instilling in me the curiosity as well as the sense of confidence to tackle any issue that I face in my career. Being essentially data-driven, pruning my quantitative hard skills, I believe that today the biggest assets that I have, and Chicago Booth gave me this, is the opportunity to be much more of a people leader, much more of an inspirational character than just a person who has, essentially, the solutions or the answers to problems that we face. So in that sense, LEAD helped me prepare very much for the challenge today I face in my career.

Jose Carlos Magallanes Neto:
I believe that Pedro possesses in the same person, several different attributes that are very seldom to be found in a single person, such as his own ability to have strategic thinking and at the same time be very detail oriented. This ability to be up high on the strategic thinking and at the same time be very down to earth and manage the small details of the operations, a global CEO that is working as hard or even harder than anyone else in the organization. So never giving up, always looking at the future and learning from the present. And this is very inspiring for a very large organization to see that the top leader of the organization is really walking the talk and talking the walk. So this is something very special coming from Pedro.

Pedro De Andrade Faria:
I am blessed to have the opportunity to meet the brightest people from all over the world, young people, full of aspirations, full of dreams. And essentially what I look for is people who are seeing their opportunity beyond their career, move beyond that logical, rational step. They are in search, not for a job, but their in search for a purpose, a reason to be connected, a reason to belong to a cause. This is to me the most important element I look [for]. I did not see myself here 15 years after I graduate from Booth. I could never expect I would be in the position I am today. So I really would like to be in the position to do exactly what I do today, to wake up every day feeling blessed and having the opportunity to have an impact in other people's lives and also bringing in South America, in Brazil in particular, Chicago Booth as a very important element to my experience and to my life.

Rob Kennedy:
I came to Washington in 1981, 1982. The board of C-SPAN ... C-SPAN's a nonprofit and the board of directors has always been CEOs of the cable companies. My boss, named Jack Frazee, was on the C-SPAN board, and he thought C-SPAN would benefit from a five-year plan. So, he had this young MBA on staff who'd been doing all this cash flow modeling with the cable systems, and he lent me to the early staff of C-SPAN. And I met Brian and worked with the staff here on this five-year plan that showed how C-SPAN could receive revenue from the industry, how much would be needed, and how we could spend that to build out our production operation, our marketing activities, and become kind of an ongoing concern with solid funding.

Brian Lamb:
Rob came in, did a great job. He's very young and very pleasant, very proficient. We all liked him here. And I remember saying, "We've got to see if we can talk him into coming to C-SPAN because he's a money manager, and I don't know the first thing about money," and offered him a job and he said yes, which I was really surprised about. And came out of a for-profit business to nonprofit and has been here ever since.

Rob Kennedy:
And then in 1987, Brian called and said, "Come down and talk to Susan and me." And he said, "Well, we have this other position to be our business person." And so we picked up the family, moved from Rochester, New York, to Washington. It was actually 30 years ago this year, and we've been here ever since.

Brian Lamb:
I was interested in changing television so that we had choice. That was the big reason for C-SPAN in the first place, and cable provided that opportunity. And then secondly, interested in the opportunity to see what was going on in the government, how they're spending our money. Rob kind of backed into all that and brought to us something we desperately needed. And, again, that is a business approach instead of just this dreamer approach. And Rob has kept me out of serious trouble for about 30 years.

Brian Lamb:
I've always been very happy to have a Chicago MBA star in our midst because that couldn't be farther away from my talents.

Rob Kennedy:
Our mission is simply to bring Washington to the American people in as unfiltered, unmediated a way as possible. If you have the time to watch a lot of these events from beginning to end, or spend time watching the Senate, or the House you learn a lot about the give-and-take that occurs in Washington. It provides a fuller picture, and I think that's important to have out there even in a time with our phones, and our feeds, and everything like that our attention spans are getting shorter.

Marty Dominguez:
Certainly, the culture here at C-SPAN started with our founder, Brian Lamb, but Rob Kennedy has slipped right into that role as well. He is a visionary for the company. He ensures that we're going to be around for the future.

Rob Kennedy:
The challenge for us, as our industry changes and people's consumption of news and media changes, is to be there for them so that C-SPAN continues to be this recognized brand of unfiltered information from Washington.

Theresa Easley:
He stays very, very calm in every situation. Even if something is going crazy that day, he is the person, the voice of reason. An analytical thinker, he kind of sits back, and he takes it all in, he processes it, and then he comes up with a solution.

Rob Kennedy:
I was so surprised and really humbled to receive the award, seeing the folks who received the award this year, and also in prior years, just to be part of this group. And I'm extremely appreciative. And I also think it reflects on what we've done at C-SPAN and what the team has done at C-SPAN to make C-SPAN successful and valued as an information source. So I think, most of all, I appreciate it as acknowledgement of C-SPAN and the service that we've provided.