What The Economist said about Latter-day Saints in business, and what it missed

The piece made one claim and dressed it in several examples. The claim was that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints succeed in business out of proportion to their numbers because the culture trains them for it, and the training it had in mind was the mission. Young men, the magazine noted, spend two years trying to sell a product for which there is almost no demand, an unusual version of Christianity with a visit by Christ to America in it, to strangers who mostly want them off the porch. Its punchline, which is the line everyone remembers, was that after two years of that, "selling airline seats or life insurance must be a doddle".

Around that core it built a portrait. The magazine drew, as the Deseret News pointed out at the time, on Jeff Benedict's 2007 book The Mormon Way of Doing Business, published by Warner Business Books, which had already assembled the roster of executives that every later article reused. It noted the large families, the stable marriages, the abstinence from alcohol, and the habit of keeping three months of food in the house, and it said the group had a passion for business. It also made an argument about organisation: a church with no paid clergy that hands a 12-year-old real duties, and a theology that treats God as an organiser of matter rather than a creator from nothing, will produce people who think in structures.

That is the whole case. It is a cultural explanation with a single mechanism, the mission, and a supporting cast of habits. The magazine did not run a survey, did not count executives, and did not compare the group with anyone else. That is not a criticism of a 1,000-word column; it is a description of what a reader is entitled to check.

Almost every name in the 2012 coverage had appeared a year earlier. Bloomberg Businessweek's June 9, 2011 article "God's MBAs: Why Mormon Missions Produce Leaders", by Caroline Winter, listed Marriott International, American Express, American Motors, Dell, Lufthansa, Fisher-Price, Deloitte, Madison Square Garden and Stanley Black and Decker, and quoted Clayton Christensen on his mission to South Korea in the early 1970s. James Crabtree had covered the same ground for the Financial Times in July 2010. The Economist's contribution was compression and a joke.

The Harvard Business School angle was also in circulation. McKay Coppins reported from the campus for BuzzFeed on March 14, 2012 and counted about 40 members of the Latter-day Saint Student Association, most of them BYU graduates and all but three of them men, and recorded the school's own adage that its student body is made of three Ms: Mormons, military and McKinsey. Kim B. Clark had run the school as dean from 1995 to 2005 before leaving to be president of BYU-Idaho. Christensen, the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration, had been in the same first-year economics class at BYU as Romney and Clark in 1970. The Economist itself had called Christensen the most influential management thinker of his time. The material was all there for a magazine to pick up, and it did.

The table below lists the executives the 2011-2012 coverage kept returning to, with the facts that can be verified. Note how many served missions, and note also how many were mid-career by the time the coverage arrived; the sample was chosen after the fact.

Four of the eight have a mission in the public record; the others may well have served, but the sources used for this site do not say so, and the point of a table is to print only what they say.

The most useful response to the piece came from inside the culture, not from its critics, and it came fast. On May 21, 2012, sixteen days after The Economist's issue date, Lane Williams wrote a Mormon Media Observer column in the Deseret News that took the magazine's premise and did the arithmetic it had skipped: if members are 2 percent of the country, then ten of the Fortune 500 chief executives ought to be members, and he could find one, Nolan Archibald. Williams described the whole genre, of which The Economist's piece was the latest entry, as the habit of picking successful members and holding them up while never counting the rest, and he called the result a stereotype. A week before that, on May 14, the Christian Science Monitor had run a longer and more careful piece by G. Jeffrey MacDonald that made the same cultural argument with named sources, including Benedict himself, the historian Matthew Bowman, and Joseph Ogden of BYU's Marriott School, who offered the least flattering and most believable version of the thesis: that the culture turns out steady managers rather than stars, and that plenty of members never become executives at all. The Monitor also supplied the number The Economist had not, that Benedict's Marriott School ranked 34th of 441 American business schools and was 90 percent members. Two months later the argument moved from members to the institution. Bloomberg Businessweek's July 2012 cover, "How the Mormons Make Money", also by Winter, described a church-owned corporate empire without hard figures, and its cover art, which reworked a sacred painting into a gag about a shopping mall and a Polynesian theme park, drew a statement from spokesman Michael Purdy calling the article speculative and biased; the Church said profits from its businesses go to subsidised tuition and similar programmes. Reuters followed on August 13, 2012 with sociologist Ryan Cragun's estimate of $7 billion a year in tithing and $35 billion of temples and meetinghouses. By the end of that summer the reader had three different stories wearing one headline: members who sell, a business school that trains, and a church that invests. The Economist had written about the first and readers took it as evidence for all three.

The mission-as-sales-training claim has held up better than the rest, and the people who confirm it are not members. Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare, told a Fortune conference in Deer Valley in July 2023 that the state's exclusionary culture hurts its standing as a tech hub, and in the same breath called returned missionaries incredible salespeople because they have spent two years selling "the hardest thing in the world to sell". Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight told The Next Web in 2019 that the mission is an incubator for the skills his company hires for. Goldman Sachs, which had 1,300 people in Salt Lake City by 2012, was sold on the same pitch by state officials: a workforce in which most residents speak a second language.

The numbers behind the pitch are real. The Marriott School says nearly 75 percent of its students are bilingual and about 30 percent speak a third language; BYU says 97 percent of its male graduates have served. The Church's Provo training centre, opened in 1978, teaches about 55 languages and holds 3,700 missionaries at a time. And the rejection rate is as high as the magazine implied: converts per missionary fell from 8.03 in 1989 to 4.67 in 2005, and Romney, who spent 30 months in France, put his own total at 10 to 20.

The Economist wrote about salesmen. Readers heard a church that invests.

• The base rate. One Fortune 500 chief executive out of 500, against an expected ten, was findable in 2012 and would have changed the headline.
• The survey data. Pew's 2011 sample of 1,019 members found 27 percent had served a mission at all (43 percent of men), so the mechanism the piece leaned on applies to a quarter of the group.
• The state. Utah's flat 5 percent income tax, its 4.65 percent sales tax and a first-place economic outlook score for 19 straight years explain a good deal of what gets credited to culture.
• The other salesmen. Utah hosts at least 15 major multi-level marketing companies, more per head than any state, and scholars tie that to missionary training as well; Nu Skin alone sold $1.73 billion in 2024 through 1.2 million distributors.
• The institution. Deseret Management Corporation, founded in 1966, and Ensign Peak Advisors, incorporated in 1997 and reported in 2020 to hold about $100 billion, were the business story that broke within the decade, and the piece did not mention either.

None of this makes the article wrong. It makes it a column. If you want the one sentence from it that survives contact with the data, it is the joke about airline seats, because the only thing the mission demonstrably teaches is how to keep talking after the door has closed. The magazine's issue date was May 5, 2012; Romney lost the general election six months later, and the genre of articles about the group's way of business went quiet for a decade until a whistleblower's complaint in December 2019 gave it a new subject.