Biography | Brian Niccol — The Hyde Park MBA Finished the Year Before This Atrium Opened

A boxed-goods marketer is easy to file as someone who never left Cincinnati.

The second diploma was earned on this Hyde Park campus while he still held a P&G job.

Niccol completed an MBA at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business in 2003.

Booth's own speaker page and Miami University's alumni profile both give that year.

The school did not take the Booth name until 2008, after a gift from David Booth.

This building was not yet open in his graduating year.

In 2003 the full-time MBA still used a scatter of older Hyde Park halls.

The Charles M. Harper Center, designed by Rafael Viñoly at 5807 South Woodlawn Avenue, opened on 23 September 2004 for the fall quarter.

The Chicago Tribune recorded the date and the $125 million cost at the time.

P&G work and the degree overlapped.

Contemporary profiles have him as a ThermaCare brand manager and then on Pringles from December 2002.

Two years after the diploma he left consumer packaged goods for Pizza Hut, a Yum! Brands division, as vice president of strategy in late 2005.

The Harper Center is now the public face of Chicago Booth.

A visitor meets the Woodlawn Avenue frontage and the winter-garden atrium, not the 2003 classroom.

The portrait attached is from June 2023.

Photo: building, Karla Kaulfuss, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Phi Delta Theta, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.