In corporate America, CEOs are our celebrities. Having worked as a consultant for many Fortune 500s, I know the incredible demands placed on these people and often wonder how they have time for family, hobbies or any personal downtime.
One of the things we do at Boardroom Insiders is “tag” each executive according to their interests so you know whom you should take golfing, versus sailing, or fly fishing or wine tasting, etc. You get the idea.
We recently compiled a list of all of the interests in our database to get a sense of what CEOs like to do when they are not in CEO-mode.
Seeing how many CEOs like golf, it is no wonder golf outings and tournaments are the most common CEO engagement tactics. Golf tops the list of executive passions, by a landslide.
Other top interests include tennis, reading, skiing, running, music, hiking and travel, which is somewhat surprising considering that these professional road warriors might be inclined to stay home whenever they get the chance.
We also discovered some more unusual pastimes among prominent business leaders. For example:
- Eugene Roman of Bell Canada is an avid beekeeper.
- Martin Richenhagen of AGCO Corporation favors dressage. A competitive rider for 30 years, he was the team leader of Germany's dressage team in the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.
- Scott Ford of Alltel enjoys roping and has participated in the national team roping championships.
- Robert Miller, Jr. of Delphi Corporation enjoys building elaborate model railroads.
- And Antoine Bernheim of Generali Group plays bridge and won the Gold Medal at the 2003 World Bridge Championship.
Stay tuned for more fun executive factoids in future posts.
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