Top B Schools

...as a CEO track position. When you get up to that level in the heirarchy your network helps somewhat but it's more about outperforming others and making the impression on the people at the top of the organization that you are the best person to lead the company going forward. Your business school will help somewhat at the junior levels, but in senior management it means very little. I would say to you look at the annual reports of the forturne 100 companies and see the profiles of their CEO's. The majority of current CEO's of today's company's never even went to B-School. Granted things have changed for our generation but out of the millions of employees at fortune 500 employers, there are 500 CEO's. Those individuals got to that perch by consistently differentiating themselves from the pack based on their performance, not based on the name on their diploma.

HBS and Stanford have the reputation of churning out leaders but I think it's more the people who are interested in a career in management gravitate towards those schools rather than those indivuduals going in and being made into leaders.