Kirt Walker’s education in the long run

Kirt Walker has a photograph that does a useful job of rearranging the usual executive priorities. He stands beside a red-and-white pickup, arms folded, wearing a checked shirt. The vehicle gets most of the frame. It belonged to his father, and Walker has described it as his favorite. Before the corporate title comes the family truck.

The picture offers a good entrance to a career that can otherwise disappear into a sequence of president-and-chief-operating-officer titles. Walker became Nationwide’s chief executive on October 1, 2019. He had already spent 33 years inside its family of companies. By the time he took charge, he had worked on both sides of its business: insuring property and helping people prepare financially for the future.

Those are considerable responsibilities for someone whose early understanding of responsibility involved livestock. Walker grew up on a family Century Farm in Iowa. He participated in 4-H and FFA, then joined Iowa State University’s Block and Bridle Club. His brother shared the youth leadership experience; their father spent more than two decades as a 4-H leader. Serving other people was part of the family routine before it became a leadership philosophy.

“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for farming,” Walker said in 2019. The line is unusually literal for a corporate origin story. Agriculture supplied the setting, the early practice and a continuing connection to the business he would eventually lead.

A farm that stayed in the family

Walker’s parents met while detasseling corn. In a 2020 interview, he said that he and his brother were still managing the family’s Century Farm in Kossuth County, Iowa, although they did not farm it themselves. The distinction matters. His connection to agriculture extended beyond a childhood recollection into decisions about a property with a history longer than his own.

He also offered a rather specific reading habit: he had read nearly every issue of Successful Farming since 1986. Plenty of executives describe themselves as lifelong learners. Keeping up with decades of a farming magazine gives that description an agreeable amount of mud on its boots. It also helps explain why the agricultural customer appears so frequently in his account of Nationwide’s purpose.

His formal education followed a management path. At Iowa State, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in management. He later earned a Master of Science in management, emphasizing leadership, from The American College. The subjects fit the career, but the agricultural clubs offer a less polished, more revealing detail: he was practicing how to organize people well before a board was choosing him to run a company.

Who turns up after the storm?

Another Iowa memory gave insurance a particular meaning. As a young person in Algona, Walker saw the aftermath of an F4 tornado. He remembered three groups arriving quickly: the National Guard, the American Red Cross and insurance professionals. The last group made an impression. He connected their work with helping families recover and identified that experience as an inspiration for his career.

That memory gives a practical shape to a business whose everyday language can be forbiddingly abstract. A premium is a recurring bill. A claim is the point when a promise has to become useful. In Walker’s telling, the appeal of the industry began with watching people appear when a community needed them. The work had faces before it had a balance sheet.

His later involvement with the American Red Cross is part of that same public record. He served on its national Board of Governors from 2016 through December 2024, after earlier service with the Greater Columbus organization. The connection is worth keeping in view: an institution he noticed arriving in his hometown later became an institution he helped govern.

“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for farming.”Kirt Walker · 2019

Thirty-three years before the top job

Walker joined the Nationwide family in 1986. His route upward included leading Allied Insurance, its former independent agency subsidiary, and senior operating roles in Nationwide’s property and casualty business. In 2009, he moved into leadership of Nationwide Financial. The change gave him a decade in a different part of the company before he became chief executive.

There is an advantage to learning a large organization through more than one business. Property insurance and retirement products ask different questions about time, risk and customer needs. Walker’s preparation required familiarity with both. His appointment followed a board search, and he succeeded Steve Rasmussen, who had led Nationwide for the preceding decade.

The record is more interesting than a simple celebration of staying put. Walker remained within one corporate family while changing the work he was responsible for. That is a useful distinction in a career spanning decades. A long tenure can mean repeating an assignment; his included a substantial move across the company’s two principal businesses.

Four words, and permission to ask

Walker has organized his leadership approach around four words: people, planning, performance and partnerships. They have the reassuring alliteration of something that might appear on a meeting-room wall. The more useful material lies in how he explains them. In his account of people and planning, he makes room for advice that is honest enough to be inconvenient.

He recommends assembling a “personal board of directors”: trusted managers, mentors and leaders willing to say what someone needs to hear. He also confesses that golf is a pleasure rather than a particular strength. Playing alongside better golfers, he says, improves his own game. It is a modest illustration of his larger preference for surrounding himself with capable people.

His planning argument connects an entry-level employee’s goals to the chief executive’s goals. It also allows for the obvious complication that circumstances change. The appeal here is in the mechanics: work should connect across an organization, and plans should have room for contingencies. That leaves rather less space for a strategy that looks impressive only while nobody touches it.

In his companion essay on performance and partnerships, Walker argues for clear expectations and for employees being comfortable admitting uncertainty. Leaders should explain the direction, while teams have room to determine how to do the work. Asking for guidance early gives a manager a better chance to help than arriving after a decision has become expensive.

He also puts competition outside the company’s walls. Colleagues share an outcome and owe one another cooperation. Customers, meanwhile, judge an insurer against experiences they have with other brands, including businesses far outside insurance. The implied standard is demanding: being adequate by the habits of one industry may leave a customer unimpressed.

A hundred-year company needs a next year

Nationwide turned 100 in 2026. For Walker, the anniversary brings an unusually close fit between personal history and institutional history. The company began with Ohio farmers seeking fairer automobile insurance prices. Its original name, Farm Bureau Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, required rather more breath than the familiar jingle does today.

In his centennial message, Walker thanked partners and the community and placed the company’s farming origins alongside its future ambitions. He has consistently treated the agricultural relationship as part of Nationwide’s foundation. Back in 2019, he also identified an opportunity to help farmers with retirement and succession planning, subjects easily crowded out by the daily demands of running a farm.

The numbers give the anniversary a second frame. Nationwide reported $73.2 billion in total sales and premiums for 2025, compared with $68.5 billion in 2024. It reported $4.29 billion in net operating income and $32.8 billion in total adjusted capital. These are company results, achieved across its businesses and workforce, rather than personal trophies for the chief executive.

Walker’s explanation emphasizes the combination of a diverse portfolio and a mutual structure that supports decisions over a longer horizon. The operating question is how to keep serving customers now while preserving the ability to honor future commitments. It is a fitting problem for someone who still talks about a farm maintained across generations.

His annual-report message finds a smaller number to make the point about service: Nationwide’s first claim was $25, paid after equipment was stolen from a customer’s car in 1926. It was resolved in 24 hours. Set beside the modern company’s billions, that payment supplies a human unit of measurement. Someone lost something. The insurer answered promptly.

The city beyond the office

Walker’s work also reaches into Columbus civic life. He co-chairs the Columbus Partnership’s governing board, linking his role at a national insurer to the economic future of its home city. His other commitments include The Institutes, which supports insurance education, and the advisory council at Iowa State’s Ivy College of Business. The subjects return to familiar territory: learning, local responsibility and relationships that outlast an individual transaction.

In June 2026, Nationwide announced a minority investment in the Columbus Crew, joining Haslam Sports Group and the Edwards family in the ownership group. Walker described the move in terms of the team’s connection with Central Ohio and the city’s future. The investment belongs to Nationwide. It is another setting in which his public role involves explaining why the company’s future and Columbus’s future belong in the same conversation.

The centennial also supplied a more hands-on measure of involvement. Nationwide challenged employees to contribute 100,000 volunteer hours during 2026. By October 6, the company reported that they had passed the target. More than 6,000 hours supported the Mid-Ohio Food Collective, and 146 employees had individually contributed more than 100 hours. Walker thanked the employees whose time made it possible.

A company anniversary can produce a great many speeches. This one also produced packed food boxes and hours given to community organizations. That is a useful place to leave Walker’s story for now: the executive overseeing national insurance and financial businesses, still returning to the question of what people owe the communities around them. The truck in the photograph looks entirely at home.