The Alma Maters of Fortune 100 CEOs and other MBA News Snippets

By Tim Dhoul Updated Aug 30, 2019

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Introduction
Which business schools did Fortune 100 CEOs attend?
Wharton MBA & movie producer talks risk assessment
Investors beaten by ‘monkeys’ in Cass Business School report
Combining a Harvard MBA with playing drums for M.I.A.

The Alma Maters of Fortune 100 CEOs and other MBA News Snippets main image

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Which business schools did Fortune 100 CEOs attend?

After the latest Fortune 500 list was released at the start of this month, U.S. News has now compiled a list detailing which US business schools awarded an MBA to CEOs at the Fortune 500’s top 100 US-based companies, the Fortune 100.

Harvard led the way with eight MBA alumni CEOs in the Fortune 100, followed by Wharton with four. Meanwhile there were two alumni representatives apiece from Chicago Booth, The Kellogg School of Management and the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

However, in compiling the list, U.S. News discovered that less than half of the CEOs had MBAs, citing Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as a notable example of a hugely successful Fortune 100 CEO who has achieved his success without the formalized management education of an MBA program.

Wharton MBA & movie producer talks risk assessment

The producer of the Transformers movies, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, talked about the impact of his Wharton MBA and how Hollywood runs on risk assessment, in an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian this week.

Bonaventura, who also produced 2007’s Stardust, said it was during his time at Wharton that he decided to embark on a career in the film industry, having already decided that his previous positions in sports programming and Wall Street no longer excited him.

The Wharton alumnus has his own production company and spent a number years as a senior studio executive with Warner Bros. He believes that the popular conception of Hollywood producers belies how much attention must be given over to risk assessment – and that this is a key skill he acquired at Wharton.

“The reality is, we’re very akin to investment bankers...You get inspired creatively, but from a business point of view you have to evaluate different kinds of risk, and if you do that well you’ll get a lot of movies made.”

Investors beaten by ‘monkeys’ in Cass Business School report

Cass Business School research reveals 'monkeys' capable of besting human investors Speaking of investments….the question of whether random stock-picking by electronic ‘monkeys’ could beat human decision-making was on the agenda at Tuesday’s annual wealth management conference at the CISI (Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment.)

The shocking answer to this question is yes – according to research conducted by Cass Business School faculty last year. Dr. Nick Motson, a lecturer in finance at the school, presented a talk entitled: ‘Investment Management: Monkeys vs Humans’ to an audience that included the UK’s business secretary, Vince Cable.

Over a period dating from the late 1960s and using a sample of 1,000 companies with traded equities, the Cass Business School team simulated random stock-piling abilities that could be equated to a series of monkeys choosing and weighting stocks at random.

“The results were incredible…What we hadn't known, what hadn't been certain, was that the performance of a randomly generated index would beat the market-cap index. We were expecting the market cap index to beat at least some of them. It beat hardly any of the ten million monkeys over the 43-year period,” said Cass Business School’s Dr. Motson.

Combining a Harvard MBA with playing drums for M.I.A.

A current Harvard MBA student has somehow been managing to combine her studies with going on tour with the British-Sri Lankan artist, M.I.A.

Drummer, Kiran Gandhi, plans to use her Harvard MBA to discover the music industry’s unmet needs, reveals a blog from a prospective MBA in the Huffington Post. In the meantime she’s been relishing the chance to perform with a musician who, according to Wikipedia, is the only artist in history to have been nominated for an Academy Award, Grammy Award, Brit Award, Mercury Prize and Alternative Turner Prize.

Gandhi got the opportunity to meet M.I.A. while doing an internship at the artist’s record label, Interscope. She started playing gigs with M.I.A. in June, two months before beginning her Harvard MBA, but both parties didn’t want to leave it there.

“I started school in August and got another email. Do you want to come to Poland and the UK? Do you want to do Mexico? Chile? Argentina? New York? Yes, I said. Let's make it work,” said Gandhi.

Written by

Tim Dhoul

Tim is a writer with a background in consumer journalism and charity communications. He trained as a journalist in the UK and holds degrees in history (BA) and Latin American studies (MA).