‘McCombs Made’

Most success stories are nonlinear. They come with failures, unexpected challenges, and pivots. Those are the stories of “McCombs Made,” a recently launched podcast featuring world-changing alumni and other McCombs-connected leaders. 

Gary Kelly, BBA ’77, who became CEO and vice president of Southwest Airlines before age 50, is on the inaugural podcast. He reveals that he wants people to think of him simply “as a good part of the team.”  

During his interview, Kelly says he was attending The University of Texas at El Paso on a football scholarship when he gave up his financial aid to make a destiny-changing move. He enrolled as an accounting student at UT Austin and says the hard work and discipline he learned — while paying his own tuition — helped prepare him for challenges at Southwest. He presided over its tremendous growth, as well as the Christmas 2022 travel meltdown during severe weather. 

“The road to success is not a straight line. We made mistakes,” Kelly says. But the solution is learning from missteps, says Kelly, and making the necessary changes so they don’t happen again.  

Others on the podcast include jewelry magnate Kendra Scott; Tiff’s Treats founders Leon Chen, BBA ’01, and Tiffany Taylor Chen, B.S. ’01; and Phil Canfield, BBA ’89, founder and CEO of Ariet Capital and namesake of McCombs’ Canfield Business Honors Program.  

Launched in Fall 2023, the monthly podcast is produced by Miranda Bradley, McCombs’ development and external relations marketing manager, and the Drag Audio Production House at UT’s Moody College of Communication. Students play key hosting and editing roles.  

Firdous Layla Khezrian, a UT junior majoring in corporate communication, is the lively interviewer. She acknowledges that she has at times been intimidated by heavyweights, such as Kelly, but she sounds at ease sharing her experiences and asking about coping strategies and lessons learned.  

“I’m the daughter of a refugee and immigrant,” says Khezrian, whose mother came to the U.S. from Afghanistan. “Nowhere in my life did I ever think that . . . people who were world leaders in the field of business were within my reach, let alone that I could sit across the table and engage with them.” 

Kelly came to the studio with his wife, Carol, whom he met in eighth grade. He tells Khezrian he has been at the airline for 37 years, becoming CEO in 2004 and executive board chairman in 2022.  

As chairman, he says, he views himself as a grandparent who loves time with the grandchildren but understands that the day-to-day parenting is not his role.  

Scott’s link to McCombs is through the Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute that she established in 2022 with a $13.25 million endowment. Scott tells Khezrian how she often jokes about earning her MBA from the little hat box shop she started at age 19 after dropping out of college.  

Scott dreamed of opening hat stores across the country and struggled for five years before concluding that “it just wasn’t working.” But what she learned from that failure about merchandising and marketing proved essential to starting and building her jewelry enterprise. 

At Tiff’s Treats, the Chens weathered growing pains when they lost their shared kitchen space and the shop lease. Instead of giving up, they addressed each new challenge, including a name change from “Tiffany’s Treats” to “Tiff’s Treats.” It’s all in the podcast. 

When asked what she hopes listeners take away from “McCombs Made,” Bradley had a simple answer.  

“Inspiration,” she says. “We want people who are considering McCombs as a higher education home to be inspired by the people who leave here and go on to do great things. We also want alumni and prospective supporters to be encouraged by these stories of philanthropy so they, too, might reconnect with their Longhorn community.”