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Fortune

Phil Wahba, Emma Hinchliffe

Four of the 46 female CEOs in the Fortune 500 can thank one company for their ascent

PepsiCo Fortune Foot Locker Lauren Hobart Mary Dillon Broadsheet

(Credit: All courtesy of companies)

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Today's guest essay comes from Fortune senior writer Phil Wahba, who examines how PepsiCo became a 'CEO factory' that propels execs to the top of corporate America. Plus: Iran considers abolishing its morality police and Jane Fonda is protesting again. Have a productive Monday.

- CEO factory. What do Dick’s Sporting Goods’s Lauren Hobart, Hershey’s Michele Buck, Land O’Lakes’s Beth Ford, and Foot Locker’s Mary Dillon all have in common? In addition to being four of the 46 women CEOs in the Fortune 500, they also spent a significant portion of their careers at food and beverage conglomerate PepsiCo, where they honed the skills that got them to the corner office.

PepsiCo is considered one of the most successful “academy companies,” corporations that have a rigorous, highly refined leadership development program that makes them veritable CEO factories. Only consulting firm McKinsey and fading industrial giant General Electric have produced more of today's Fortune 500 CEOs than PepsiCo's total 16. (Male PepsiCo alums currently leading Fortune 500 companies include the CEOs of Target, McDonald’s, Albertsons, and Delta Air Lines.)

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