“Of the CEOs of the top 20 companies in last year’s Fortune 500, exactly one — Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos — went to an Ivy League school (Princeton).”
(Scoop’s note: that’s not exactly correct. Warren Buffett went to the Wharton School for three years, then got an MBA from Columbia. The article should say “exactly one received his bachelor’s degree from an Ivy League school.”)
Setting my quibble aside, it’s an interesting article. I’ve wondered about where the very top performers earned their degrees, if any.
As somebody who used to be in charge of hiring fast-track management trainees, I’d say that the value of prestige degrees depends on the career you have in mind. I worked in retail, where learning the business requires getting your hands dirty, motivating apathetic employees, working long hours at times when your friends are playing, and a lot of very hard work in unromantic environments. My experience was that Ivy Leaguers didn’t have the right stuff. I looked for people who had experience getting past the pain wall – people from the military academies, or athletes in endurance sports. I was willing to bet on a West Point grad or a competitive swimmer from LSU rather than a Harvard business major with a 3.9.
But when I was staffing up my strategic planning department some years later, I looked for something completely different. I looked in-house and told the H.R. people to just send me the smartest people they could find who were currently underemployed, because I needed raw brainpower, and you can’t teach that, but extremely smart people can learn almost anything quickly.
I don’t know if this actually fits here, but it’s annoying me a little right now. I was listening to Bloomberg News on the radio and one investment analyst and one person in an interview who I believe is an institutional stock trader both said that “we expect a trade deal between the U.S and China to be done soon.”
This goes along with the same thing that for the past several months, every time the various stock markets drop significantly, especially the Dow Jones Industrial Average, over news of further problems between China and the U.S, Donald Trump does an interview in which he says something like “we’re making major progress towards a trade agreement, expect one soon” and, every time, the various stock markets have then regained their losses.
The Wall Street Traders, many of whom I assume receive their degrees from Ivy League Schools, and who refer to themselves as ‘The Masters of the Universe’ (after author Tom Wolfe called them that in ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’) still take Donald Trump at his word.
Fool me once, I believe you…
Fool me twice, I’ll still believe you…
Fool me three times, I’ll still believe you…
How stupid are these people?
From what I’ve read, Trump told the truth on this one. (I know. Whoda thunk it??) They were just about to sign a fully negotiated and mutually agreeable deal when Xi, thinking incorrectly that Trump was desperate for a deal, tried to sneak in some last-minute changes. Here is the story in yesterday’s NYT.
I stand corrected. I apologize to Donald Trump. 😐
Wharton is University of Pennsylvania, which is very much an Ivy League school.
Correct. That was my point. Warren Buffett went to TWO Ivy League schools so the article is incorrect to say “only Bezos went to an Ivy League school.” However, it would have been correct to say that Bezos was the only one to receive his bachelor’s degree from an Ivy League school. (Buffett transferred to Nebraska for his senior year.)
But they’re well connected/networked…
… which is the most important qualification for some positions.
There are a few studies out there that shows most Ivy League students are not even at those colleges because they are particularly smart. In fact many are there because of who they are – usually children of alum. Also, some studies show the grading in those schools is significantly less rigorous than in most state universities. In other words, they didn’t get there because they’re smart and when they leave they won’t necessarily be any smarter than when they walked in.
But how do you determine who the smartest are? By where they graduated from and what degrees they have?
In my case, the company I worked for used intelligence testing, almost like IQ tests. Every employee in management or who wished to be a candidate for management had to take a 300-question battery of tests. 60 of the questions were the Raven Matrices, 100 of them were logical reasoning “if this … then _____” . I don’t remember the other components off the top of my head, but almost all of it was pure intelligence, no real knowledge required. So our H.R. guys had an easy time responding when I just asked for the smartest employees available.
In fact, the second-highest score on the battery in the entire history of the company (and we had something like 60,000 employees) was attained by a secretary! It turned out that she had graduated from The University of Colorado (I can’t recall which campus) with a 4.0 index, and was working as a secretary. Those were male-dominated times. As I recall, I doubled her salary. She was so damned smart and such a self-starter that she basically needed no training at all. As I recall, she had some kind of liberal arts degree, but within a couple of months, she was schooling me on financial analysis!
The second-smartest person I hired was a junior computer programmer, also a woman. Her ability to understand what I asked for, and what I should have asked for, was absolutely amazing. She had some kind of unusual, alternate processing power in her brain – she could sit and write code while reading a book at the same time. I’ve never seen anyone else like that. Freakish!
Anyway, enough anecdotes. I guess I wasn’t helpful. It was easy for me because our company basically used a form of IQ tests. I can’t really tell you how to go about it, but you might study how companies like Google try to measure creativity and brainpower from the interviewing process alone.