Brooks Tingle and the education of an impatient insurer

A useful place to learn the insurance business is the department that pays the people who sell it. Brooks Tingle handled agent commissions early in his career at John Hancock. The work put him close to a constituency with an immediate interest in whether the company could keep its promises. An incorrect payment is a remarkably efficient way to secure somebody’s attention.

Years later, as president and chief executive, he would return to that experience when explaining how he understood the business. Customers mattered. So did the agents and advisers between the customer and the company. A strategy could look perfectly respectable at headquarters and still make life difficult for the person trying to explain it across a kitchen table.

The work offers a practical beginning for a leadership story: a young employee learning where the money went, who expected it, and what happened when the machinery disappointed them. Each transaction made the company answerable to somebody outside its walls. For Tingle, those early encounters became part of the preparation for running the machinery himself.

One brand, several educations

Tingle’s route through John Hancock took him across operations, marketing and strategy. He worked with claims, call centers, premiums and billing, and eventually the technology supporting those functions. These are departments a customer usually notices when something needs doing. They offer a more demanding education than a company brochure.

Consider the range of problems involved. Billing needs accuracy. Customer service needs explanation. Technology needs to make both possible at scale. Marketing then has to describe the result in language somebody might willingly read. Moving among those responsibilities gives an executive several ways to interrogate the same proposal. Who buys it? Who services it? What has to happen after the sale?

His formal education stayed close to home: a bachelor’s degree in economics at the University of New Hampshire and an MBA at Boston University. His professional education kept changing subjects without changing the name on his business card. He has described spending his career with one brand, while joking that Manulife’s acquisition of John Hancock in 2004 made it feel like two different companies.

The distinction matters. Staying can mean repeating familiar work. It can also mean watching familiar work become unfamiliar, then learning it again. Tingle’s account belongs to the latter category. The Canadian parent brought a different corporate setting to a Boston institution; the operating jobs gave him a view beneath the institution’s name.

A promotion with a precise date

On April 1, 2023, Tingle became president and CEO of John Hancock, succeeding Marianne Harrison. He had already led John Hancock Insurance. The new appointment put him in charge of Manulife’s U.S. segment and brought him onto the parent company’s executive leadership team.

A succession announcement can make an entire career look like a tidy staircase. The operational detail makes this one more interesting. The person taking the larger job had spent time with the functions that would have to execute his decisions. An instruction to simplify a process would eventually reach people doing work he had once overseen.

The scope also needs care. John Hancock offers life insurance and annuities. The name appears in investment and retirement businesses as well, but its leadership description distinguishes the separate Global Wealth and Asset Management business. Corporate names travel farther than individual reporting lines. Tingle’s position is substantial enough without assigning every activity under the brand to his desk.

The paperwork has competition

For all its technical complexity, Tingle’s critique of insurance can be disarmingly ordinary. Buying it takes too much effort. Owning it has too little appeal. People compare a transaction with the other transactions in their day, rather than with the industry’s proudest historical achievement. A cumbersome application does not become charming because the company has been around for a long time.

In 2020, he discussed John Hancock’s JH eApp, an electronic application platform intended to shorten and simplify the purchase process. His ambition was expressed in eight words: “easy to buy and fun to own.” It is a phrase with the useful property of requiring no translation from management English.

The electronic application belonged to a broader effort to reduce paperwork and the time between an application and a decision. The interesting part, for a profile of Tingle, is where he placed the emphasis. A digital tool earned its place by improving an experience. A screen could be part of that improvement, but having a screen was hardly the whole assignment.

That approach makes his operational background relevant again. Simplification for a customer can demand considerable coordination inside the business. Forms, systems, distribution and administration have to agree with one another. The elegant button at the end is easy to admire. The agreements behind it are where much of the work lives.

“easy to buy and fun to own”

Brooks Tingle, describing his ambition for life insurance

Hiring somebody who wants to get on with it

Asked in 2025 what he looked for in senior appointments, Tingle singled out impatience. Technical ability was necessary, but finding qualified people was not the hardest part. He wanted a desire to move the industry forward, and enough conviction to keep working when change became difficult.

Impatience is an entertaining qualification for a business that makes promises measured in decades. Yet the combination is coherent. A long obligation gives a company reasons to be careful. It also gives it plenty of time to accumulate procedures nobody would invent afresh. The leadership problem is deciding which habits protect a promise and which merely protect a habit.

Tingle’s word suggests a preference for colleagues who ask the second question. It also raises a useful test for his own ambitions. Faster cannot simply mean louder. A proposed improvement has to survive the customer’s experience and the company’s ability to deliver it. The person who once dealt with commissions has reason to appreciate that distinction.

There is room here for a particular kind of corporate temperament: enough familiarity to understand why a process exists, and enough irritation to ask whether it still earns its place. Tingle’s career gives him the familiarity. His stated hiring preference supplies the irritation. His preference makes a familiar answer - that something has always been done this way - a particularly weak defense of the status quo.

When the customer interrupts the spreadsheet

In a 2018 interview, Tingle acknowledged a mistake that does not lend itself to a comic anecdote. The company had sometimes relied too heavily on analysis when making decisions, he said, allowing designs that looked attractive on paper to lose touch with what customers actually needed.

That is a more revealing admission than a polished tale about an early mishap. Analysis is indispensable in insurance. The danger comes when the analysis becomes so satisfying that nobody checks the experience it describes. A product can be internally logical and externally baffling. Both things can be true before lunch.

He also recalled a student who approached him after a university event. The young man wanted to thank John Hancock: a policy his father had bought before a fatal car accident had helped him and his brother continue their education. Tingle has returned to the story in public conversations. It gives the abstract business of financial protection a specific consequence.

The student’s reported gratitude gives a financial contract a place in a family’s history. It connects the work at headquarters with decisions made far beyond it. A sale made earlier, through an agent’s persistence, had affected what two brothers could do later. Tingle’s interest in the people distributing policies follows naturally from an account like that.

Results, with the labels left on

The recent financial record adds another dimension to his tenure. For 2025, John Hancock reported growth of 24 percent in annualized premium equivalent sales, 22 percent in new business value and 42 percent in new business contractual service margin, compared with 2024.

Those labels deserve to remain attached. None of the three numbers is a synonym for total company revenue. Together they show the measures the parent used to describe new business progress. They offer a more useful assessment than treating every favorable percentage as interchangeable evidence of success.

Public recognition has followed, too. ThinkAdvisor named him a 2025 Luminaries Executive of the Year in Insurance and Retirement Products. In 2026, Boston Magazine included him among its most influential Bostonians. The awards belong in the record; they do not explain the career as well as its less ceremonial details.

Commissions. Calls. Billing. An application that should take less effort. A design that looks good until a customer tries it. These give Tingle’s leadership a recognizable shape. He has spent years inside a company whose promises last a long time, while insisting its processes need not take quite so long. The patience is in the promise. The impatience is in getting the work done.