CEOs Who Were Mormon Missionaries

Bloomberg Businessweek published “God’s MBAs: Does the Mormon Faith Produce Better Leaders?” a while back.

While an interesting read,* I hate to break it to my Mormon friends and students, but this article doesn’t provide much solid evidence to back up its claim.

There are two reasons.

First, there is the problem that Nasem Taleb calls the invisibility of the drowned worshippers (no aspersion intended). There are 4 possibilities that you need to think about:

	Made CEO	Didn’t Make CEO
Did Mission	1	2
Didn’t Do Mission	3	4

The article only includes people in cell 1. But, if you really wanted to assess whether missions were helpful, you’d need to do a few things. You’d start by making an estimate of the count or proportion of how many people were in each cell. Then you’d want to do some basic data analysis: is ratio formed by taking the value you put in 1 and dividing by the value you put in 2 larger than doing the same to cells 3 and 4? Lastly, you’d actually want to firm that up with an actual hypothesis test.

 

You should note that doing those first two bits of data analysis is not that hard, and certainly not beyond what is often published in a data intensive magazine like Bloomberg Businessweek. The fact that they didn’t do this is telling.

Second, there is the problem endogeneity problem. What a reader really wants to know about a topic like this is whether going on a mission increases your chances of being a CEO. The endogeneity problem, in short, is what if there is a third factor that helps you be successful at both? Like charisma. If you don’t include charisma in your analysis, then you might be inclined to think that going on a mission increases your chances of making it to CEO, but if you did include charisma, you might find that there is very little relationship left over from missions to CEO positions.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a relationship, but I am saying that there is really basic econometrics left undone here.

* The online article missed one of the coolest parts of the print article: the marginalia listing Mormon CEO’s. They are listed in this separate article entitled “Mormons In Business”.

Technorati Tags: mormon,lds,mba,ceo,drowned,worshippers,endogeneity

Comments

[Rodet]

Interesting. My ears always perk up when things like this run in the press, but I hadn't seen this. My guess, and I don't think it takes any "insider knowledge" is that cell 2 swamps cell 1 by a double digit factor. Missions teach one a lot, but I'd bet (not literally of course) it's spurious correlation indeed.

[Dave Tufte]

This actually is an older piece that I drafted and then forgot to post. I'm glad I brought it to your attention.

I think this got my attention because I'm working here at SUU ... you get a lot of this stuff that someone is wonderful because they did a mission and then a good career, but you don't hear much that maybe they were successful at both for the same underlying reasons.

You also get a lot of this in business schools too. It bugs me when they bring in super-successful executives (who probably benefited from a lot of luck along the way). I wish they'd bring in more of the I-failed-ten-times-before-I-got-it-right sort. I think that would be more realistic for students.