Walter Dill Scott

Born in Chicago, Scott was the grandson of his namesake, Walter Dill Scott, who was Northwestern University’s president from 1920 until 1939. Scott mostly grew up in Evanston, and he moved with his family to Winnetka, where he graduated from New Trier High School. Scott earned a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern in 1953. He served in the Navy from 1953 until 1956, when he moved to New York and began working in consulting for Booz Allen Hamilton and attending business school in the evenings at Columbia University’s Columbia Business School. After graduating from business school in 1958, Scott worked in investment banking in New York for Glore, Forgan & Co. He left Glore Forgan in 1965 to head up Lehman Brothers’ office in Chicago. In 1973, Scott moved from Chicago to Washington, D.C., after President Richard M. Nixon appointed him to be an associate director of the federal Office of Management and Budget. He stayed on after Nixon’s resignation. After two years in the job, Scott moved his family to Minneapolis, where he worked from 1975 until 1980 for Pillsbury Co. as its chief financial officer. In 1980, Scott became the CEO of IDS Financial Services, now known as Ameriprise Financial, in Minneapolis. He left the company in 1984 after its sale to American Express, and then began commuting to New Jersey, where he worked as chairman and CEO of the U.S. operations of leisure, manufacturing and property conglomerate Grand Metropolitan, which now is part of Diageo. Always possessing a strong passion for Northwestern University, where he was chairman of Kellogg’s board of advisers, Scott in 1988 moved back to the North Shore to become Kellogg’s first clinical professor. He began teaching classes focused on corporate strategy and leadership. Scott retired from Kellogg in 2013. Scott sat on 15 corporate boards and the boards of 25 nonprofit organizations, his son said. He chaired the board of directors of the nonprofit group Communities in Schools Chicago, and was on the board of the nonprofit One Acre Fund, a group aimed at eradicating hunger in sub-Saharan Africa by providing individual farmers with financing and training. Scott also served on the board of National Louis University. Scott, 86, died of complications from lymphoma on Feb. 8 2018 at Evanston Hospital, said his son Gordon. In addition to his son Gordon, Scott is survived by his wife of 56 years, Barbara; two other sons, Tim and David; and eight grandchildren.