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How do you start a business without raising capital? Can AI help us understand our judgements of specific facial features? Do sales and marketing generate more value than previously thought?

On April 25, 2025, more than 700 Chicago Booth community members gathered at the Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel and Gleacher Center in Chicago to hear answers to these questions and more. Esteemed Booth faculty and notable alumni came together to share research, provide insights, and debate critical issues facing today’s business leaders.

Selected highlights from the conference are below.

Opening Remarks from Dean Madhav Rajan

Madhav Rajan, dean and George Pratt Shultz Professor of Accounting, opened the keynote conversation and luncheon by acknowledging the passing of former Booth dean and professor John P. “Jack” Gould, MBA ’63, PhD ’66, last year. Rajan praised the former dean’s leadership during the expansion of the school’s entrepreneurial coursework and the creation of Booth’s Weekend MBA Program, as well as Gould’s contributions at the US Department of Labor and the Office of Management and Budget for the Executive Office of the President.

“We’re deeply grateful for Jack’s service and meaningful contributions to Booth, to the field of economics, and to society,” said Rajan.

Dean Rajan went on to share highlights from the past year, including the recent $100 million gift from Konstantin Sokolov, MBA ’05 (XP-74), in support of the Executive MBA Program, which was subsequently named for Sokolov. Rajan also recognized the 2024-25 Distinguished Alumni Award winners.

Keynote Conversation with Joe Mansueto and Steve Kaplan

Steve Kaplan, the Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance and Kessenich E.P. Faculty Director at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and Joe Mansueto, AB ’78, MBA ’80, founder and chairman of Morningstar, Inc., began the keynote by discussing the early years of Morningstar, which Mansueto founded out of his apartment when he was 27 years old.

Mansueto credited his education at Booth for piquing his interest in investing and imparting a foundational understanding of the field to him. However, when it came to starting his own company, Mansueto knew he could not raise the necessary funding in a typical fashion.

“I was in my mid-twenties, and I knew I couldn’t really raise money,” Mansueto said. “But if you construct your business so people pay you upfront for subscriptions, services to be rendered in the future, you can use that to fund the business. … That’s what funded Morningstar, and what does to this day.”

Morningstar’s Focus on Value

Kaplan pointed out that Morningstar does not issue guidance or hold earnings calls.

“We don’t meet with shareholders except once a year at our annual meeting,” Mansueto added. “In the interim, if they have a question, we ask them to put it in writing, send it to us, and then every month we answer them, so everyone gets the same information at the same time.”

“You don’t increase your value by spending time with Wall Street analysts,” Mansueto continued. “So the message was, let’s keep the management team focused on building value.”

Strategic Decision-Making

Mansueto laid out two principles that guided his decision-making as chief executive officer at Morningstar: a focus on investors and economic moats.

“We maintain an intense focus on investors and solving their problems, and that’s what we’ve done for forty years,” explained Mansueto.

“The other [principle] is this concept of moat,” Mansueto said. He explained that an “economic moat,” a metaphor Warren Buffett brought into conventional wisdom, refers to a business’s ability to maintain an advantage over its competitors.

“In our view, there are five sources of moats: it could be brand, it could be switching costs, it could be a network effect, or it could be a couple more capital-intensive ones like efficient scale. … We always looked at what we could do to widen and deepen this moat. That served as a nice framework in terms of capital allocation and where we wanted to put money,” Mansueto said.

Life After CEO

Mansueto discussed the projects he has taken on since stepping down as CEO of Morningstar in 2017, including his purchase of the Chicago Fire in 2019.

“I got involved with soccer through my kids, when they started to play. It’s just super fun. … As a family, we started to watch it professionally, and I just got hooked on the game,” Mansueto said.

“Live sports, from an investment perspective, is also a good place to be,” he added. “It’s also partly a civic project. Chicago did not have a world-class soccer team. And Chicago, to me, is a world-class city and deserves a world-class soccer club.”

Since moving into the role of executive chairman, Mansueto says he has been able to expand his focus into multiple “circles,” without overextending himself. He spends time with his family, invests in venture capital and real estate, and mentors young entrepreneurs, along with pursuing other interests.

“Sam Zell once said, ‘Be the chairman of everything, and CEO of nothing.’ I’ve taken Sam’s advice to heart,” Mansueto said.

Payouts, Guidance, and Activism—Why CFOs Can’t Afford to Get It Wrong

Douglas J. Skinner, the Sidney Davidson Distinguished Service Professor of Accounting, walked his audience through strategies that companies can use to boost their stock prices when they feel they’re undervalued. Skinner used BP, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and other companies as examples, explaining the elements of capital allocation, discussing the pros and cons of dividends and stock repurchases, and highlighting how companies use guidance in conjunction with payouts to enhance value.

“Increasing dividends is a way for a CEO to demonstrate confidence in the company’s future growth and profitability. Declaring a dividend makes stock prices go up initially, as does giving guidance. If you marry the two, it makes it credible to an investor,” Skinner explained. 

“But,” he warned. “If you give guidance, you’ve got to hit it.”

Using AI to Model Subjective Preferences for Faces and Objects

“What constitutes a trustworthy face?” Alexander Todorov, the Walter David “Bud” Fackler Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science, asked during his session on mapping facial features and social judgments using AI.

With AI-generated images now able to produce “extremely customizable” synthetic images, Todorov explained, people can easily manipulate features to elicit a desired judgment—for instance, making a face more masculine or feminine. While it’s easy to judge something like age or femininity, he said, when it comes to more complex judgments, such as trustworthiness, people’s reactions and evaluations vary widely. This variance exposes the limits of using structural models to map facial features to judgements.

“If someone looks trustworthy, it doesn’t mean they necessarily are. This is about representations of the people who are passing the judgments. What I like might be different from what you like, and that’s how human preferences work,” Todorov said.

Gender Inequality: An Overview of Recent Research

Marianne Bertrand, the Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, posed theories to explain the incongruous phenomena of a growing education gap between men and women, where more women are attending college, and the persistent gender pay gap, wherein men earn more than women for the same work. This dissonance can be explained in part by three hurdles women still face in the professional world, according to Bertrand: a deficit of women choosing to study STEM fields; maternity leave limiting women’s ability to get hired and advance; and women’s disproportionate share of domestic duties.

Bertrand pushed back on the notion that women were not interested in STEM fields or did not have the skills for high-powered positions, using psychological research to argue that powerful gender stereotypes discourage women for pursuing male-dominated fields and limit the likelihood women will be hired for leadership roles.

Maximizing Corporate Social Responsibility Impact: Aligning Strategies with Consumer Perceptions of Responsibility

“Where are the opportunities for companies to pursue social good from a profitable perspective?” asked Abigail Sussman, professor of marketing and Beatrice Foods Co. Faculty Scholar, during her session on corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Sussman invoked broad questions about the purpose of business, on which there are widely divergent viewpoints—from Martin Shkreli in the pharmaceutical industry to Yvon Chouinard at the helm of Patagonia—and well-known theoretical frameworks—from Nobel laureate Milton Friedman’s, AM ’33, shareholder-first doctrine to Edward Freeman’s stakeholder theory, which holds that businesses exist to do more than simply make money for shareholders. Narrowing her focus to examine perceptions of CSR and the impact of internal and external CSR actions, Sussman presented recent research on the effects of companies’ CSR tactics on consumer preferences and behaviors.

Sussman concluded her session by asserting that opportunities for companies to further public good “are not going to be everywhere, but we can seek them out.”

Investing in Consumer Capital

Sales and marketing expenses are an investment, not a variable cost or what could be called “overhead,” according to Amir Sufi, the Bruce Lindsay Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, Finance, and Public Policy.

Sufi presented a study in which he and his colleagues that found that customer capital, generated and enhanced by companies’ investments in sales and marketing, is a main source of intangible capital value for companies in a range of industries. This research has also begun to explore what drives industry-level variation to understand the mechanisms through which investment in customer capital boosts value.

“This is not about advertising—it’s about sales force, customer service, brand value, customer data,” Sufi said, noting that the fastest growing industries are also the ones spending the most on sales and marketing (e.g., information services, platform services like Uber and Lyft, and online retailers).

Additional Conference Highlights

Other breakout sessions included:

Perspectives on Investment Banking
Moderator: Yueran Ma, professor of finance and Fama Faculty Fellow
Panelists: Scott Adelson, MBA ’87; Timothy George, AB ’74, MBA ’75; Melissa Knox, MBA ’05; Cary Kochman, MBA ’90, JD ’90

Treasury Market Dysfunction and the Role of the Central Bank
Anil Kashyap, the Stevens Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Finance

The Economics of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains
Eric Budish, the Paul G. McDermott Professor of Economics and Entrepreneurship and Centel Foundation/Robert P. Reuss Faculty Scholar

Big Stakes and Big Mistakes: Heuristics and Biases Amongst Professional Investors
Alex Imas, professor of behavioral science and economics and Vasilou Faculty Scholar