The colleges and companies shaping America's leaders

BUSINESS IS EVOLVING FASTER THAN EVER BEFORE, and companies are rethinking the path to the C-suite. Whereas in the past aspiring leaders might earn their stripes by rotating through another part of the business for a year or two, today more top firms are “constantly providing people with new opportunities,” says Stephan Meier, a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School. To supercharge the pace of skill-building, workers now have to change jobs more frequently. The ability to not only rapidly learn new terrain but also guide teams in overcoming new challenges is becoming an indispensable leadership skill, Meier says.

- BY JEREMY GANTZ

This is, in essence, what global consultancies like Accenture and Deloitte are designed to do. No surprise, then, that five of the top 10 best companies for future leaders in TIME and Statista’s new ranking are consultancies. The study analyzed the résumés of 4,000 top U.S. leaders in business, government, academia, nonprofits, and other sectors to see where they previously worked and studied. Compared with last year’s list, that’s twice as many résumés drawn from a wider range of fields and leadership positions. With 175 organizations now included, the new ranking offers a wide-angle look at the places today’s top leaders are most likely to have spent at least some of their professional lives.

The list of colleges most commonly attended by American leaders remains heavily tilted toward the Ivy League or similarly prestigious schools (such as Stanford, MIT,

Nassau Hall at Princeton, which ranks ninth among U.S. colleges producing top leaders

University of California, Berkeley, and University of Chicago), underscoring what University of Arkansas associate professor Jonathan Wai calls “a huge education divide in this country.”