Page 66 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

You Know You Don’t Know Enough • 47

McGraw-Hill Professional, has had as its initiative since 2005, “Learn
more. Do more.”
You don’t need to be signed up for an executive MBA program at
Harvard, Stanford, or Thunderbird. According to Spencer Stuart, 87 per-
cent of Fortune 300 company CEOs did not attend an Ivy League school.
In fact, only 273 of 400 on Forbes’ 400 wealthiest list have a college
degree. Effective leaders want street smarts over school smarts or over-
educated and underexperienced.

Walter Kirn, wrote in Time:
I went to Princeton. There: my résumé. Usually I slip it in more
casually. I wait for an opening, a cue, a question. I rarely wait
very long, though. As every Ivy League graduate discovers, the
greatest benefit of that education is social, not intellectual. I
went to Princeton. That statement opens a lot of doors. But
should it? . . . I learned instead—and in only a few weeks—that
Princeton wasn’t heavenly at all but a flawed, all-too-human,
institution whose reputation seemed exaggerated compared
with the quality of the education it offered. Because I had
transferred there from a smaller school—Macalester College in
St. Paul, Minnesota—I had a basis for comparison. Although
Princeton had far more money and mystique, its reading lists
were composed of the same books, and its students were filled
with the same questions. But the students carry those books
with more aplomb, and they asked their questions with more
confidence.
That was the Ivy League’s X factor. It bred confidence. I
remember taking an exam once next to the heir to a legendary
fortune who kept peeking at my test sheet. I knew a few things
that he didn’t, it turned out. . . . Later, many years after I
graduated, as I watched my former classmates climb to the top of
enormous corporations . . . I felt I was rising with them. I knew
deep down, of course, that they, and I, were no better than
anyone else, but the world seemed to think we were.