BUSINESS
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ORGANIZATIONS LIKE THE GENeral Electric company, IBM and Procter & Gamble have long been touted as classic “academy companies.” Academy companies produce firstrate executives who populate their own senior ranks and go on to lead other companies. We wondered if they continue to play a role in today’s markets. Do they still exist? Do they matter? Have the names changed?
In partnership with The Official Board, a firm specializing in providing data about organizational charts and executive movement, our team surveyed 853 executives and interviewed executive search consultants to better understand today’s academy companies. We asked executives to list the top three academy companies in their function, industry and country (those companies operating in their country, not just headquartered there). Looking across all three lists, the most mentioned companies were: McKinsey, Google, Microsoft, Unilever and P&G. (For a full list of the top 25 companies, see Sarah Abbott, Robin Abrahams, and Boris Groysberg, “ What Makes a Company Great at Producing Leaders?” Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2023/12/what-makes-a-com-pany-great-at-producing-leaders.) The top vote-getters for each category are listed on the opposite page.
While the classic academy companies still make the list, they are not as prevalent as some others. Strategic consultants, global accounting firms and consumer packaged goods companies loom large. The largest companies globally had a strong showing in the survey. (Four of the five lar
