BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Debbie Stroud ‘90, Whataburger president and CEO, brought her leadership insights to Illinois Wesleyan University’s campus during the second annual Kinder Brothers Distinguished Business Speaker Series.
The series hosted by the School of Business and Economics was held on Wednesday afternoon in Hansen Student Center, and was made possible by the generosity of the late Gary ‘55 and Jack ‘50 Kinder.
The Ellsworth native and Illinois Wesleyan alumna spoke about her unique experiences and how they helped her build a career in a presentation titled, “A Degree of Curiosity: How Liberal Arts Shaped My Leadership Journey.”
“If you had told the accounting student who walked across this campus that she would one day lead a restaurant brand with more than 1,200 restaurants and more than 50,000 family members, I’m not sure she would have known what to do with that information,” Stroud said.
Stroud grew up on a farm where her first job was walking beans, so she joked she went from walking beans to counting them when she became an accounting major. Her first gig, however, was selling lemon shakeups at the McLean County Fair at 14.
Stroud first joined Whataburger in 2023 as the Chief Operating Officer and became CEO in 2025. Before that, she spent over 27 years with McDonald’s, where she reached Vice President and General Manager status. She also spent over five years with Starbucks, where she ultimately became the Senior Vice President of Retail Operations and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed her to pivot into a different direction.
She highlighted three words throughout her speech: Curiosity, Connection, and Choices. She said accounting taught her how to find answers with numbers, while the liberal arts taught her to ask the right questions and find out what the numbers were truly saying.
For her, the word “curiosity” meant having the discipline to understand a problem before trying to solve it as quickly as possible. The word “connection, however, came to mean participating in life to the fullest, meeting people who can teach and challenge you to see possibilities you cannot see in yourself, rather than simply networking and having transactional relationships," she explained.
“McDonald’s taught me how to compete. Starbucks deepened my understanding of how to partner. I had to show up differently – ready to give, build and share rather than prove that I already knew the answer,” she said.
While choices for Stroud began small by learning the ins and outs of each restaurant, she ended up making the bigger decisions, such as leaving McDonald’s, joining Starbucks, moving across the country to Seattle and ultimately saying “yes” to Whataburger.
Now as a leader, she often says, “Choose what you want to get an ‘A’ in.”
“You cannot get an ‘A’ in everything. There will always be more opportunities, more demands, and more good ideas than you have time or resources to pursue,” she said. “The choice is deciding what matters most and giving it your best attention, energy, and effort.”
As CEO of Whataburger, she makes choices every day on where to invest their capital or how to market their products, but she stressed how choices are not just about what you sell – it’s about how you tell your story.
“When I think about the CEO role, it literally is a liberal arts job; I spend the majority of my time connecting dots, be it across functions, across geographies, across the industry to understand how to move it forward,” she said during the event.
She encouraged attendees to stay curious, build genuine connections and continue to make choices even without knowing where they will lead, as she isn’t done making the tough choices yet herself.
"So, the superpower, I think, of having a degree like at Illinois Wesleyan is that it really helps you navigate the map. There's not a map given to you. You get a map, and then you learn to navigate it,” she explained. “And I think (it gives you) those critical thinking skills, which means curiosity is how you think through and ask better questions."
Those who missed the in-person event or the livestream can still view Stroud’s presentation at www.iwu.edu/kinder.