From which firms do Fortune 100 (F100) CEOs emerge? Are there some companies that do a better job of helping put employees on a path to CEO?
To find out, I looked into the F100 CEOs and identified several factors associated with their career paths: undergraduate schools, undergraduate degrees, graduate schools, graduate degrees, educational majors, functional emphasis, the number of years at their current company (at which they are CEO), and the companies that produce more F100 CEOs (methodology below).
This article is focused on identifying the companies that help set employees up early in their careers to become F100 CEOs. Specifically, I identified all of the firms at which each F100 CEO worked immediately after graduation and then summed across firms. The goal was to determine whether there are early-career employers that put individuals on a glide path to CEO.
In an earlier article, it was revealed how little multi-firm experience the F100 CEOs have (see article here). Nearly 30% of the F100 CEOs have only worked at one firm—the firm at which they are CEO. This highlights the criticality of “growing up” in these large firms and makes sense. For the largest firms, they can be extremely complex—multiple geographies, products, and business units. This is on top of functional complexity—finance, marketing, sales, operations, legal, human resources, etc. To be adequately equipped to lead such a firm, having in-depth company experience appears to be a prerequisite for many.
However, for the remaining F100 CEOs, they had experience at more than one firm. Interestingly, only seven firms employed at least two F100 CEOs upon graduation. Below are the seven.
While the seven firms are from different sectors of business, they all tend to be long-standing leaders within their respective industries except for Arthur Anderson, which no longer exists. They also are very large firms in their own right, with most among the F100. This suggests that to run a very large firm, it is helpful to have blue-chip training early in your career from a well-respected industry leader. Understanding how to navigate extreme complexity is required to build and lead one of the world’s largest companies.
For additional insight on Fortune 100 CEO career paths, see the following: the undergraduate institutions they attended, the graduate schools they attended, the number of companies they have worked for, the early-career firms at which they worked, the undergraduate degrees they earned, and the early-career functions in which they chose to work.
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Methodology: To identify CEO information, a number of information sources were used: 1) Bloomberg, 2) Company websites, 3) Company proxy statements, 4) press releases, 5) Wikipedia, among others. While most of the information was accessible, there were 10 occasions where the data was unavailable or conflicted across resources. In such cases, the CEO was excluded from the total CEO count in the statistic calculated if unavailable/inconsistent. Additionally, some firms were acquired and the CEO transitioned to the acquiring firm. In such cases, the CEO’s tenure at the current firm was calculated starting at the time of the merger/acquisition. The CEOs were identified in September 2018 and the research was conducted in winter 2018/2019. A special thanks to Wilkerson Anthony, an outstanding research assistant with whom I worked from 2014-2019, who helped source and code the information. Also, thanks to Tyla Gallegos who created the data images.
