Brock Leach’s business-school friends at the University of Chicago would jokingly say they were mad at him when job offers came rolling in: He always got the plum offers, while the others would often be stuck with courtesy rejection letters.
“He would get a job offer every time he was interviewed,” said one of those friends, Julie, of those heady days in the early 1980s. The pair, friends at first, would go on to date and then get married, in 1982. “Brock was always a big picture person and someone who always knew where he was going. He was a very strategic thinker and people saw that.”
Brock would go on to lead a big and full life, where, among other roles, starting with husband and father, he was president and CEO of Frito-Lay North America and CEO of Tropicana Products in Bradenton; a committed philanthropist, mostly to education, social justice and equal opportunity causes; and, in a unique career move that began in his late 40s, an influential minister…