The Educated Executive

According to Time-Honored (if not entirely reliable) Horatio Alger tradition, almost any ambitious young man, with a lot of good fortune, could quickly reach the top of the ladder in the business world. The principal ingredient in the formula for success was luck: a careening carriage being pulled wildly along a street by a team of runaway horses--and, of course, inside the carriage, the terrified, nubile daughter of a multimillionaire. The young man needed only to fling himself on the horses' harness and, by dint of courage and brawn, bring beasts, carriage and the terrified, nubile daughter to a safe halt just short of disaster.

"My hero! You have saved my life!" the lovely damsel would breathe in gratitude. "I shall see that my father rewards you!"

Soon afterward, our hero would find himself happily and wealthily ensconced as--at the very least--a vice-president in one of the tycoon's giant companies and married, equally happily, to the tycoon's daughter.

I have no way of knowing how many--if any--Horatio Alger-style success stories were actually recorded in the history of American business. Certainly, the aspiring executive of today would have an extremely hard time trying to make his mark by waiting for a runaway Cadillac to pass him on Madison Avenue, Wacker Drive or Wilshire Boulevard. These days, reaching the upper rungs of the ladder of corporate success is hardly a matter of luck. Few, if any, of our modern-era business executives are born. Virtually all of them are made--in the sense that they are produced by various processes of education, training and experience.

Fortune magazine, which has established an enviable reputation among businessmen for its intensive coverage of the business world, has, at various times, sought to determine the qualities that make the nation's executives. I recall one survey conducted by the magazine that was aimed at gauging the level of education among executive personnel. In the course of the study, questionnaires were submitted to the chairmen, presidents, vice-presidents and other top-level executives of more than 800 U. S. companies. Results indicated that, of the 1700 upper-bracket management men responding, two out of every three were college graduates and one fourth of the remainder had at least some undergraduate training.

Impressive as these statistics might seem--and they do reflect a very high proportion of college graduates in the ranks of top management--a similar study made more recently, but among a smaller group of business leaders, showed that the proportion of college graduates was even higher: around 85 percent in this particular sampling. The educational qualifications of U. S. business executives are even more striking when some additional facts are considered. As Fortune pointed out, less than two percent of all American male college graduates have made Phi Beta Kappa. But in the upper strata of U. S. business management, the ratio of IBKs is five times greater than this: Nearly ten percent of the men holding top-level executive positions are entitled to sport IBK keys on their watch chains. And among the men who are at or near the apex of the business pyramid, some five percent made the dean's list, graduated cum laude or better or were chosen as valedictorians during their college careers. Eleven percent of these top executives were members of academic societies while attending college.

Charting the educational-attainment levels of younger executives through the years from 1900 to the present day, one is struck by the steady and unwavering upward curve. The conclusions are inescapable. The modern-day business executive obtains more formal education than his predecessors, and the better-educated (continued on page 154) The Educated Executive ((continued from page 143)) executive is most likely to rise fastest and farthest.

Thus, on the face of things, it would appear that the nation's colleges and universities provide the best of all executive breeding grounds. It would appear that the principal prerequisite for success in business is a college education and that, once he has his sheepskin in hand, the college grad can scramble nimbly to the top of any corporate pyramid.

Unfortunately, first appearances are sometimes deceiving--and even the most accurate and carefully compiled statistics do not always reveal all the facets of the story they strive to tell. For many years, I--and seasoned businessmen of my acquaintance--have noted a very definite and increasing trend toward overspecialization in education. In all too many instances, the emphasis has been on the technical training of young men and women who intend to make their careers in the business world.

Admittedly, this is an age of specialization--a fact that holds as true for the business world as it does for, say, the medical profession. I'll be the first to grant that there is a great need for specialization in business--and I will even concede that business could not operate today without specialists.

However, I regard as disheartening the growing trend toward overspecialization, toward one-track orientation among young executives--especially in their education. It seems that many young men are devoting an inordinately large portion of their academic lives to the study of the "useful disciplines"--while ignoring those subjects that aid an individual in developing into a multidimensional human being.

Figures show that, for a long time, there has been a steady relative decline in the number of male college students who enroll in liberal-arts courses or who choose elective courses designed to broaden their cultural interests. "To the young executive, speculative thought is as foreign as the game of boccie," Walter Guzzardi, Jr., wrote in a recent magazine article. Culturally, Guzzardi concluded, the young American executive is a narrow man.

I think that at least some of the blame for this lies with our colleges and universities. I'm sure that a part of the current student unrest stems from feelings that the educational establishment is not in tune with the times. I can feel considerable sympathy for the intelligent college student who resents depersonalization. The universities have been selling the study of the useful disciplines and have, in a great many instances, done little to make the humanities appealing to young men who are eager to hear--and heed--guidance from school authorities or faculty members. Overemphasis on the useful disciplines is not so very far removed from the attitude that education should teach simple motor tasks. This attitude can produce a breed of depersonalized automatons. But the entering freshman student, desiring to prepare himself for a business career, is attracted by useful or practical courses; they seem to have intrinsic value. He is far less enthusiastic about the "soft" courses--dealing with the arts or the social sciences, for example--because he is not taught that they have any practical use.

It has been more than half a century since I attended college. Nonetheless, I can recall being less than satisfied by the teaching processes that prevailed--as it happened--at the University of California at Berkeley. I left Berkeley to complete my education at Oxford. There I found that the student was granted much greater freedom. Compared with Berkeley, there was infinitely more emphasis on the humanities. The student at Oxford was allowed to learn at his own pace and encouraged to read widely--far beyond the limits of any specialty or major.

Part of the blame for overspecialization can also be laid at the doorstep of some companies that, according to reliable accounts, prefer to hire the one-track type and shun the man with broader interests. Scores of books purport to provide infallible guides for executive selection. At least as many firms specialize in testing applicants for executive positions. Most of the books and testers say--or at least hint unmistakably--that an applicant's desirability falls in proportion to his cultural interests. On at least one test, according to Martin Gross, author of The Brain Watchers, evidence of a desire to visit fine-arts museums is taken as a warning that the candidate may not be 100-percent masculine.

Obviously, I disagree vigorously with such attitudes. While I am gratified that today's young executive is extremely well educated professionally and that he has the knowledge necessary to do his job well, I deplore the narrowness of his formal education and of his interests. I cannot help but feel that an education that fails to broaden one's outlook is an inadequate education. Neglect of the humanities--which give a student cultural interests and at least some understanding of people, the world and its institutions--can have no beneficial effect.

Today's top executive must be acutely aware of all that goes on around him. He must realize that his business--and business in general--is but a part of a social whole. He must understand that whole and all its parts. The head of a large corporation cannot seal himself within his corporation and shut out the rest of the world. There is far too much interdependence and interaction between business and other segments of society for that to be possible.

Beyond this, the one-track executive who has no grasp of matters outside the boundaries of his own narrow professionalism cannot do a proper job at the top levels of management, because he loses touch with human realities. Guzzardi has pointed out that the average young executive does not have much of the "stockholder mentality." "That white-haired old lady in sneakers in whose stout defense members of top management speak so vehemently and so often is a comparative stranger to the young executives," he charged. "They leave her fate to the boss."

To me, a veteran of more than half a century as a businessman, such attitudes on the part of young executives are intolerable. This new breed of executives seems to have lost--or, quite possibly, never had--the human understanding that makes all the difference in business. That this is at least in part due to their superspecialized educations, their concentration on the useful disciplines and the consequent narrowing of their out-look is a reasonable assumption. It is evident that their useful disciplines haven't been useful enough to inculcate in them the simple truth, known to all successful businessmen, that although the stockholder may be a "white-haired old lady in sneakers," she is still a stockholder. Whether the young executive likes it or not, stockholders are human beings who have invested in the company that employs him and pays his salary. The stockholders, after all, own the company.

The statement that young executives leave the stockholder's fate to the boss is startling--and frightening. The man at the top of the corporate heap worries a great deal about the company's stockholders. He has always worried about them; for he was trained, whether through his formal education or through his early experience, that business has its responsibilities: to employees, to stockholders and to society. The fact that he worries about a stockholder's fate is, very probably, one of the principal reasons the boss is at the top while the young executives who do not have the "stockholder mentality" are still well down the ladder.

I know from personal experience that my own college education--especially at Oxford--served me in excellent stead throughout my business career. I learned much, and I have often applied the knowledge I gained to good advantage. But my studies in the humanities--subjects that expanded my cultural horizons--were of the greatest value. It was from these studies that I gained understanding and insight into the structure and development, the functioning and the dynamics of our world and our society. At the same time, I developed interests that have provided me with great pleasure and gratification throughout my life. They helped me be a better man--and a better businessman. My exposure to a wide variety ((continued on page 218)) The Educated Executive (continued from page 154) of liberal-arts subjects made my mind more flexible, more receptive to new ideas, more readily aware of changing circumstances and, at the same time, more convinced of what constitutes real and lasting values. In short, I do not hesitate to state flatly that I consider my liberal-arts education to have had far greater over-all importance than any of the purely technical or professional subjects I studied.

I do not doubt that what I have said will appear to border on heresy for those who still cling to the concept of the business executive as a superspecialist. I am well aware that there are many companies that want their accountants to be accountants, their production experts to be production experts, and so on--and damn Aristotle and Zwingli.

Now, none of this is intended as a slap at business departments or management faculties in our universities and colleges. Both are excellent, generally conceded to be the best in the world. My point is that there has been a growing tendency toward specialization at the expense of broader subjects that not only expand the horizons of the students' minds but make them better human beings and, in the long run, better managers.

I particularly like what John Ciardi has written in his essay "An Ulcer, Gentlemen, Is an Unwritten Poem." Ciardi argues: "Let [a man] spend too much of his life at the mechanics of practicality and either he must become something less than a man or his very mechanical efficiency will become impaired by the frustrations stored up in his irrational human personality. An ulcer... is an unkissed imagination taking its revenge for having been jilted."

Happily, there appears growing evidence that the trend toward producing superspecialized executives is being slowed or even reversed. There seems proof that some of the nation's business leaders are recognizing the need for more diversified education of executive personnel. Take, for example, the survey conducted not long ago by Floyd A. Bond, Dick A. Leabo and Alfred W. Swinyard of the Graduate School of Business Administration of the University of Michigan. Sixty-six big-business chief executives were asked to give their opinions regarding the educational requirements they considered essential for top-level executives. Nearly one third of the respondents said they believed an education in the liberal arts or humanities provided the best background--and this third did not suggest that any secondary field of emphasis was needed. Almost as many of the chief-executive officers interviewed believed that basic liberal-arts courses modified by secondary reference to business gave the tyro executive the best grounding. The third-largest group held that liberal-arts training modified by a secondary emphasis on science and/or engineering would provide the business executive with the best and most helpful educational background.

As if this were not sufficient to indicate the shift in the business-education wind, witness the findings of two recent major studies that were conducted by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. The results of the two studies were published jointly and, although there were some areas of disagreement, one conclusion stood out sharply. Both studies strongly recommended that business education should be based solidly on the liberal arts.

I have discussed the problem of the narrowness of the young executive's education with more than a few business leaders with whom I am acquainted. Almost without exception, they--and this includes those holdovers of a past era who themselves received little or no formal education beyond grade school--agree that the executive whose mind has been trained for one-track business orientation is only half an executive.

The men who actually head the nation's largest corporations appreciate the importance of the humanities in the education of young men who hope to achieve success in business. Several major companies have even sponsored programs under which their more promising young executives could expand their cultural horizons by taking liberal-arts courses on company time and at company expense.

One of the first of these programs was launched by the Bell Telephone Company in 1953, when a group of the firm's executives attended a two-semester course at the Institute of Humanistic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Other companies have since followed suit, and many colleges and universities have developed special liberal-arts courses for executives. In addition, some corporations have gone in for crash programs, sending selected executives--not infrequently men who are already on the upper rungs of the corporate ladder--to seminars and courses designed to increase their knowledge and appreciation of matters cultural.

These companies understand that, although he may have a string of degrees after his name, the executive whose education has been almost entirely professional is not well equipped to understand the broader social implications of business. He is most likely a rather empty man, whose sole concern in life, to the point of obsession, is his job and the struggle for advancement. Success becomes the end in itself. It might surprise him to learn that his one-track preoccupation lessens his chances for success.

I assure you that if I were contemplating the establishment of, say, a new company or a foreign subsidiary, I would not rely on an executive with single-function orientation to conduct the negotiations. Not on your life--or, rather, not on my hopes and expectations of success.

The men I would choose for the task would have to solve problems and make decisions on the spot. Although they might conceivably be weak in certain technical areas, they would be well-rounded individuals whose education had enriched their intellect and judgment--rather than merely providing them with a degree of practical or technical know-how. Such has always been my policy, and I am firmly convinced that it is largely responsible for whatever successes I have achieved during the course of my business career.

Today's young executive has two choices. He can choose to be educated as a narrow specialist, little more than a technician, concentrating entirely on the useful disciplines and disdaining all else; or he can choose to become a well-rounded man--a man of taste, discernment, understanding and intellectual versatility. If he selects the former course of action, he is quite likely to remain a junior or middle-grade executive throughout his career. If he chooses the latter, he will greatly increase his chances of reaching the top--and he will enjoy life and himself much more in the process.