Foreign travel aside (scheduled, usually, around business trips to the Morningstar office in London), it's not clear how he spends his money. Not on cars; he drives a 1988 Montero and parks it on the street. Or clothes; his favorite haberdasher is the Gap. "I feel rich when I walk into the Gap and I can buy anything I want," he says without irony. "Like, I bought six colors of this polo shirt. I don't really worry about the price. I'll spend 400 bucks at the Gap like that." He has a weakness for a concoction he calls "tea misto" (tea with steamed milk) that he special-orders at Starbucks every day, but it doesn't cost any more than what's on the menu.
"Here's another extravagance," he says finally. "I have a woman who cooks for me, cleans for me, grocery shops, does my laundry, pays my bills. She's wonderful. As soon as I come home, she has dinner mostly prepared. Then she'll start the wok or whatever, cook it up. Then, when I'm done eating, she washes the dishes and goes home. It lets me work longer. It lets me focus more on what I need to do."
In the beginning, his focus was on the product -- "like a laser beam," Mansueto says. The earliest hires worked side by side with Mansueto in his apartment. Even after the first move, things changed very little. Phillips remembers long, quiet days at the Monadnock building, all 10 of them together in a tiny room, listening to classical music on WFMT while they worked. (Until the opera music came on, the same time every afternoon. Mansueto would grow agitated and eventually would stand, stretch, and walk across the room and change the station. "Opera really grates on Joe's nerves," Phillips says.)
As Morningstar has grown, Mansueto's focus has shifted. "One of the pleasures of my work is reinventing my role continuously," he says. "In the beginning I was very enmeshed in operations, which you need to be. And then, as we grew, I would hire people, until eventually all the pieces were delegated to other people, who can do them far better than I can. That took a good five years, to get to the point where I thought, 'I can't be worried about getting the publication out. Somebody's got to be looking out for the greater good of Morningstar.'
"Today I feel like there are four things that are my key responsibilities. One is setting the strategy for the company -- trying to figure out what Morningstar should look like, what products we should be offering, how we fit into the competitive landscape. Two is allocating capital and making sure that those capital-allocation decisions go about supporting that strategy. Three is making sure that we're attracting and retaining the best possible people. That's so key, it's something I'm going to be spending even more time on. And then four is making sure this is an environment where people can flourish, where they can succeed, and that allows for the creation of great products."
A lot of people who work at Morningstar think it's significant that Mansueto chose not to name the company after himself. They say it's symbolic of the company culture. "I'm always amazed by how hands-off he is," says Liz Michaels, Morningstar's chief operating officer. "Some-times it's a little unnerving." Rekenthaler concurs: "In the six and a half years I've been here, he has never told me what to do on anything." Adds Gillis, "What I like best about Joe is he leaves me alone." It took Rika Yoshida, a Morningstar editor, one week on the job before she figured out Mansueto was president -- and he had interviewed her. "The man has no ego," says Phillips, "no ego whatsoever."
But it's ironic that Mansueto would hide himself so, when the company is so plainly an expression of his will, his preferences, his personality. The obvious way to get ahead at Morningstar is to have attended the University of Chicago and studied something with no relevance to business. Phillips earned his master's degree from Chicago before he got sidetracked. Rekenthaler completed the course work for his master's at Chicago, in English, but never finished his thesis. Yoshida studied anthropology at Chicago; Gillis, history; Michaels, an anomaly, economics. Indeed, the only members of Mansueto's executive committee, known as the strategy committee, who don't get the Chicago alumni magazine at home are Sutton, the CFO (University of Illinois); Kurt Herrmann, the marketing man (Northwestern); and Julia Katz, head of human resources (Northwestern). Visitors to Morningstar are often struck by how quiet the place is, how absorbed in their work everybody seems to be, how you don't meet many backslappers and hand-squeezers around the office. ("Bookish, shy, self-deprecating" is how Phillips describes the workforce. "You've got a lot of people here who didn't set out to have a career in business," he says.) That's not surprising. It's the same quality of place Mansueto observed on his first visit to the Chicago campus and found so appealing: "A little more focus on pure learning, less on all the rigmarole."
And if Morningstar is a close, flexible, democratic community, it's because that's the kind of place Mansueto wants it to be. The only people who have offices with ceilings and doors are the office manager and two managers in human resources. Everybody else has a cubicle (the higher-ups, like Mansueto, have corner cubes, but a cube is a cube). Dress is casual -- there are lots of bare legs (men's and women's) and Birkenstocks during the summer. Facial hair is OK. Benefits are generous: stock options for everyone who has been there two years, eight weeks' paid family leave, six weeks' paid sabbatical every four years, and $1,500 for unrestricted tuition reimbursement every year, not to mention free apples and oranges every day in the lunchroom and free bagels on Wednesdays.
