In Focus
With Graditude, Kellogg Awards 2015Each year prior to Reunion, Kellogg’s most dedicated volunteers and clubs are honored at the With Gratitude, Kellogg Awards celebration and Alumni Club Leadership Summit. We applaud the recipients of the 2015 Kellogg Alumni Club of Excellence, Kellogg Alumni Club Leadership and Kellogg Alumni Club Leader Merit Awards for their outstanding service and commitment to Kellogg.
Kellogg Alumni Club of Excellence Award
Kellogg Alumni Club of Chicago
The Kellogg Alumni Club of Excellence Award is presented to an alumni club that has demonstrated strategic leadership and innovation in its approach to connecting Kellogg alumni to one another and back to the school.
Kellogg Alumni Club Leadership Award
Ahmed Elcott ’04, Kellogg Alumni Club of New York
The Kellogg Alumni Club Leadership Award recognizes a club leader who has exhibited consistent representation of the values of the Kellogg brand and the goals of the Kellogg School in building his or her alumni community.
Kellogg Alumni Club Leader Merit Award
Sean Lofgren ’01, Kellogg Alumni Club of Dallas – Ft. Worth
Kellogg Alumni Club Leader Merit Award recognizes a club leader who has made significant and sustained contributions to the Kellogg community at large.
Sidney Levy, Professor Emeritus of Marketing and Behavioral Sciences at Kellogg and an innovator on the idea of branding, celebrated his 94th birthday by debating marketing concepts with contemporaries and doctoral students.
Sidney Levy has been challenging and changing the world’s ideas on marketing for more than 50 years. On May 29, the tradition continued in front of a lucky group of Kellogg doctoral students, faculty and guests.
Levy, joined by longtime friends and Kellogg professors Philip Kotler and Louis Stern, celebrated his 94th birthday by speaking to the group about the history of marketing and how it has evolved.
According to Alice M. Tybout, Kellogg’s Harold T. Martin professor of marketing, there was a fantastic, lively debate between Levy and Kotler, often considered a pioneer of marketing theory. Levy’s discourse focused on how he believed branding is the central concept of marketing, Tybout said, while Kotler pontificated on how marketing itself is the central concept.
This kind of debate is something that has been central to his growth in marketing over his career, Levy said. His thoughts are always developing, something interactions with others in the field helps shape.
Levy played a large role in developing brand-building at Kellogg beyond typical marketing applications. Tybout, who has been on the Kellogg faculty with Levy, Kotler and Stern, said Levy’s speech took an “impressive, historical review of how the field has developed.” Tybout added, with a laugh, that the evening was almost “like meeting the president” for the doctoral students.
What does Levy think about being considered almost presidential? He said people always ask him for guidance (“That’s one of the things about being old,” Levy added), and he enjoys imparting one main piece of advice: always enjoy your work.
“If you don’t enjoy your work, I think it’s a pity because you’re just wasting your life,” Levy said.
Tamara Gaffney ’97 turns numbers into narratives
What Tamara Gaffney finds so rewarding about digging through big data is that to develop a hypothesis and gain great insight, one doesn’t always have to start at the top. “Non-conformist and non-linear thinkers are rewarded with greater insight in the world of big data,” she says.
And a non-linear thinker she is.
As the Principal Analyst at Adobe Systems, Inc., Gaffney was named one of the top 20 Big Data All Stars in 2014 by Fortune magazine, a recognition that emphasizes a successful three-year streak using a predictive model to analyze eCommerce holiday spending. That model now includes over 10 countries and has been within 1 percent accurate each year.
Having come to big data “quite by accident,” Gaffney still credits her early years in the advertising industry for grounding her entire career. In advertising, she “learned how to analyze media publications for major product launches,” and digging deeper into data over recent years has allowed her to make “marketing the most valuable role,” on a whole new level, for Adobe Systems.
The accolades don’t stop with Fortune: In February of 2015, Gaffney was named to the DataIQ Big Data 100 “power list” in the U.K. Having spent her career helping to define the role of data programs and meaningful outcomes, she is proud to discover, analyze and deliver the information in a useful way. “I am able to quickly see patterns or surprising insights from within an analysis and make the leap from insight to storyteller,” she says. “I then take a stand on what the data means in very simple and easy to understand terminology. Big data shouldn’t seem complicated to others when presented correctly.”
Gaffney works to not get too caught up in accuracy. Instead, she focuses on the “fine balancing act between speed, flexibility and accuracy,” like a true non-conformist analyst.
With an MD, a JD and an MBA, Dr. June McKoy ’10 plans
on changing elderly care in Chicago
As a teacher, physician, advocate, researcher, and a community leader, Dr. June McKoy will stop at nothing to create a better life for Chicago’s elderly population. She advocates, researches, practices medicine, and passes the knowledge she’s gained onto the medical students she teaches. In this way, she’s creating a generationof doctors that can carry on her work.
She couldn’t have predicted her path. She grew up in Jamaica and lived in England, where her mother taught her to leave the world better than she found it, and being from what she described as “a third world country,” she thought it would be easy. So she left home to attend medical school in the United States.
Caring for the elderly found a place in McKoy early in her medical career, as she saw the elderly consistently pushed aside or given the minimum treatment required. She was moved by the loneliness, lack of compassion and thoughtlessness experienced by this population and dedicated herself to giving them a voice.
In medical school, she needed to know why so many people were sick in the first place, so she earned a master’s degree with delta omega honors in public health. That’s when she found she needed to better understand American laws, so she earned a law degree with additional certifications in Elder Law and Health Law, and a LLM with Honors from Northwestern Law.
And then she really got down to business. When she started getting National Institute of Health grants, she hired a research team, but found she didn’t know how to run a small business. She needed to understand marketing and management, learn how to fund her projects, and develop a business savvy. So she earned an MBA from Kellogg.
She says the reason is simple: “Kellogg isn’t your mother’s business school.”
She was drawn to Kellogg’s emphasis on putting theory into practice; she sees negotiation, marketing, and management as the most important skills she’s learned.
“Every doctor should have to go to business school,” she says.
“Doctors aren’t taught to enter the business of medicine, and medical school training is insulated. It lacks real world application.”
As Geriatric Medicine Program Director at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, she slides Kellogg lessons into teaching all the time. She has kept all of the assignments and readings she has from her Kellogg days.
And, per her mother’s wishes, she’s done more than her share to leave the world better than she found it. Most recently, she co-founded SOAR — Senior Oncology Outcomes, Advocacy, and Research Program — a Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center program geared toward people over 65, with a cancer survivorship framework tailored for older individuals.
She is tirelessly focused on improving the quality of life and overall health of seniors. To McKoy, this is about human rights. That commitment and humanitarianism was recently rewarded when she received the Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian Award from Northwestern Medicine.
And she says she couldn’t have done it without business school.
