20th Century Great American Business Leaders is a creation of the Leadership Initiative at Harvard Business School. The database is "an effort to identify and chronicle the lives of 20th century men and women whose business leadership shaped the ways that people live, work and interact."
Leaders include those active prior to the turn of the century, such as Oscar Mayer, Marshall Field and publisher William Randolph Hearst to contemporaries such as Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, filmmaker Steven Spielberg and talk show host Oprah Winfrey.
The list of leaders can be browsed by a number of fields: last name, birthplace, industry, era, gender, ethnicity and education. Additional fields are available in the complete data set, which can be obtained in an electronic spreadsheet from Harvard Business School.
Click the "Birthplaces" link to view the states and countries where various leaders were born. Those born in Wisconsin include the inventor of the safety razor, King C. Gillette, former SC Johnson President Sam Johnson and former New York Herald-Tribune President Helen R. Reid.
Searching by industry allows you to view a list of leaders from 21 areas ranging from agriculture and mining to utilities and energy. Click the "Education" link to view where a particular leader obtained an undergraduate degree. University of Wisconsin graduates include Stanley C. Allyn, Carol Bartz, Frederick L. Maytag II, Arthur C. Nielsen, LeRoy A. Petersen and Lee R. Raymond.
Information for each leader includes company and tenure, industry, state of birth, years of birth and death, gender, ethnicity, era, the schools where the individual received an undergraduate and graduate education and a brief biography.
