Last night I was sitting around the dinner table with five people, including my wife and two other couples. Everyone was 30 years old, plus or minus a few. And aside from me, everyone at the table represented a major corporation or industry in Minnesota. Conversation drifted, not seriously, toward what it would take for the six of us to get on the board of directors of a big company.
Short answer, obviously: it's never going to happen.
You pretty much have to be a CEO of a big company to get on the board of a big company.
That got me thinking about the makeup of executive teams at big companies. Fortune 500 corner offices are famously populated with a disproportionate number of people who went to prestigious private schools like Harvard, Stanford, Penn, MIT and Cornell.
This is not the case at two of the biggest banks in the country, both of which have deep Minnesota roots, and this is something I've found interesting for a while. U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo are run primarily by people who earned their undergraduate degrees at relatively humble institutions.
John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo, got his bachelor's degree at St. Cloud State University. Richard Davis, CEO of U.S. Bank, got his at California State University - Fullerton. Mike Heid, a relatively unknown executive who runs Wells Fargo's massive mortgage division in West Des Moines, went to the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater.
They're the most glaring examples, but it turns out they're more the rule than the exception at their companies. Of the 26 people on the executive committees at the two companies, 15 went to state schools, another four went to MIAC schools (St. John's, St. Thomas, Gustavus Adolphus) and only four went to what you might call brand-name private institutions (Stanford, Amherst, MIT and Swarthmore).
Many of these people also have advanced degrees. I focused on their undergraduate institutions.
