Why do so many Latter-day Saints end up running companies

Thirty-one. That was the number of Brigham Young University graduates in Goldman Sachs's 2010 intake, and Bloomberg Businessweek reported the following June that it equalled the number from Wharton. Nobody at Goldman was hiring for theology. They were hiring people who had spent two years knocking on doors in a language they learned at 19, on a budget their parents paid, beside a companion they did not choose. That is the first and most repeated explanation for why members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints show up in business at a rate that looks out of proportion to their numbers, and it deserves a fair hearing before it gets taken apart.

The mission is a fixed product. Men go at 18 for two years; women go at 18 for 18 months (the age was 19 until 2025). The day starts at 6:30 am with exercise, then two hours of scripture study, up to an hour of language study, and proselytising from about 10 am until 9 pm, with lights out at 10:30 pm. The Church's own count of converts per missionary fell from 8.03 in 1989 to 4.67 in 2005, which is a polite way of saying that most conversations end at a closed door. Mitt Romney, who served in France from July 1966 to December 1968, later put his own total at 10 to 20 converts for the whole 30 months. He also came home fluent in French and in charge of 175 missionaries.

The family pays. Since January 1991 the Church has charged a flat monthly amount regardless of where a missionary serves: $350 at first, $400 from 2003, and the First Presidency announced in June 2019 that the figure would rise to $500 from July 2020. Multiply $400 by 24 months and a family with three sons is looking at a five-figure outlay before anyone draws a salary. Joseph Ogden, an assistant dean at BYU's Marriott School, told the Christian Science Monitor in May 2012 that the result is managers who "tend to be more steady" rather than shooting stars. The same report cited a survey in which 80 percent of members said the mission had prepared them for a career.

The Marriott School of Business at BYU began in 1891 as the Commercial College of Brigham Young Academy. It took the Marriott name in 1988 after a $15 million gift from J. Willard and Alice Marriott, and dropped "Management" for "Business" in 2017. It teaches about 2,100 undergraduates and 1,200 graduate students and counted 55,000 alumni in 2019. The figure that matters for this essay is that nearly 75 percent of its students are bilingual and about 30 percent speak a third language, almost all of it picked up on missions. Across the whole university, 97 percent of male graduates and 32 percent of female graduates have served; 63 languages are taught every term.

The pipeline runs east as well. A BuzzFeed report from Harvard Business School in March 2012 counted roughly 40 members of the campus Latter-day Saint Student Association, most of them BYU graduates, and repeated the school adage that the student body is made of three Ms: Mormons, military and McKinsey. Kim B. Clark, who left Harvard after his freshman year in 1967 to serve in Germany, was the school's dean from 1995 to 2005 and then ran BYU-Idaho for a decade. Clayton Christensen, who served in South Korea from 1971 to 1973 and sat in the same first-year economics class at BYU as Romney and Clark, became the professor whose 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma led The Economist to call him the most influential management thinker of his time.

The founder of the hotel chain fits the pattern too closely to be a coincidence. J. Willard Marriott served a two-year mission in New England at 19, walked through a sweltering Washington in the summer of 1921 watching soda carts sell out, and opened a nine-stool root beer stand there on May 20, 1927. When he died in 1985 the company ran 1,400 restaurants and 143 hotels, with $4.5 billion in annual revenue and 154,600 employees. Kevin Rollins took a BYU MBA in 1984 and ran Dell from 2004 to 2007, when its revenue reached $45.4 billion. Gary Crittenden served in Germany, graduated from the Marriott School in 1976, and was chief financial officer of American Express from 2000 to 2007 and of Citigroup from 2007 to 2009.

The state is the other half of the story, and it is easy to confuse the two. About half of Utahns belong to the Church (a 2024 estimate puts it at 50 percent, with 34 percent claiming no religion), and in Utah County, home to BYU and Utah Valley University, the share is 72 percent with a median age of 25.9. The rankings below describe a state, not a congregation.

Read that table twice. The income figure and the U.S. News ranking are the kind of thing that gets attributed to a work ethic. The fertility figure has fallen by almost a full child per woman in 16 years, which is not what a story about large families and big networks predicts. And the CNBC ranking dropped from first to sixteenth in a decade, largely on quality-of-life measures: 513 childcare centres for 3.5 million people, a $7.25 minimum wage. Whatever culture is doing, tax policy and demography are doing at least as much.

Tithing is the habit that outsiders underrate and members rarely talk about, and it deserves a paragraph on its own because it is the one practice that touches money every month for a whole working life. The Church teaches that a full tithe is ten percent of annual income, paid to the bishop, and a member cannot hold a temple recommend without declaring one; Pew's 2011 survey of 1,019 self-identified members found 79 percent said they paid it and 65 percent held a current recommend. The rule was not always ten percent. Edward Partridge defined tithing in 1837 as two percent of a household's net worth; the 1838 revelation and an 1841 statement by the Twelve fixed it at one-tenth; and Lorenzo Snow, taking over a Church deep in debt in 1898, travelled through southern Utah in 1899 urging members to pay in full, after which receipts rose and the debts were cleared by the end of 1906. Larry H. Miller, who had drifted from the Church in his twenties, directed his wife in late 1978 to start tithing on their gross income, months before he bought his first Toyota dealership in Murray for $3.5 million with $88,000 of his own money; the store sold 172 cars in its first month against a previous average of 30. The point is not that tithing makes anyone rich. The point is that a household paying ten percent off the top has to know what the top is, which means a budget, which means the family has a habit that most American households do not. The institution practises what it preaches. Asked in 2012 about a Reuters estimate that members send it $7 billion a year, spokesman Michael Purdy said the Church keeps reserves for hard times on the same principle it teaches families. Those reserves turned out to be larger than anyone outside guessed: Ensign Peak Advisors, the investment arm incorporated on September 29, 1997, was reported by the Wall Street Journal in February 2020 to hold about $100 billion, and its disclosed stock portfolio alone stood at $56.8 billion in May 2024. A culture that stores three months of food in the basement, a detail The Economist found irresistible in 2012, also stores a century of tithing in index funds.

The tech corridor between Salt Lake City and Provo has a history that predates the marketing name. The University of Utah became the fourth node on ARPANET in 1969, and Evans and Sutherland, founded in 1968, was the first computer graphics company anywhere. In 1979 two companies started within a few miles of each other in Utah County: WordPerfect, incorporated by BYU professor Alan Ashton and his student Bruce Bastian, and Novell, which under Ray Noorda held 65 percent of the network operating system market by the early 1990s. Novell bought WordPerfect in 1994, and Ashton and Bastian each walked away with almost $700 million in Novell stock. Ashton had served a mission in central Germany; he spent part of the money on Thanksgiving Point in Lehi.

The second wave was software as a service. Josh James, who left BYU without graduating, co-founded Omniture, took it public in 2006 and sold it to Adobe in 2009 for $1.8 billion; he then founded Domo and coined the Silicon Slopes brand. Qualtrics, started in Provo in 2002 by Scott Smith and his sons with Stuart Orgill, went to SAP in January 2019 for $8 billion in cash, and Silver Lake bought it out again in 2023 for $12.5 billion. Pluralsight raised $310.5 million in its 2018 listing. Goldman Sachs, which took an industrial loan charter in Utah in 2004, had 1,300 people in Salt Lake City by March 2012, its fourth-largest office in the world, and state officials pitched the workforce on one line: most residents speak a second language.

The mission teaches you to hear no forty times a day and keep walking.

The less glamorous pipeline runs door to door. Todd Pedersen started selling pest control from a trailer in Arizona in 1992 with ten employees, switched the same crews to burglar alarms, and founded APX Alarm in Provo in 1999; it became Vivint in 2011, Blackstone bought it in 2012, and NRG Energy paid $2.8 billion for it in December 2022, by which time it employed 12,000 people. Recruiters say the quiet part aloud: the chief executive of one Georgia pest control firm told a BYU-Hawaii student paper in 2015 that his company hires returned missionaries on purpose because they already have the skills. Utah also hosts at least 15 major multi-level marketing companies, more per head than any state, including Nu Skin, founded in Provo in 1984 and selling $1.73 billion in 2024 through 1.2 million distributors. Scholars link that concentration to the same missionary training.

Start with the base rate. Latter-day Saints are about 2 percent of American adults, so a fair share of the Fortune 500 would be ten chief executives. In May 2012, at the height of the coverage, a Deseret News columnist went looking and found one: Nolan Archibald of Black and Decker, who had run the company since March 1986, when at 42 he was the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500. One is under-representation, not over-representation. The same columnist noted how the stories get written: pick the successful members, describe the mission, and never count the members who did not become executives.

Then look at the survey data, which is unexciting. Pew's Religious Landscape Study put the share of members with a college degree at 33 percent against a national 27 percent, tied for sixteenth among 31 groups and far behind Hindus at 77 percent and Jews at 59 percent. Pew found 67 percent of members married against 52 percent of the public. Those are the numbers of a stable, middle-of-the-table group, not a business aristocracy. A 1968 study in Dialogue claimed Utah produced one president of the 471 largest companies for every 62,000 people against one per 205,000 nationally, but that was a consulting firm's count from the 1960s and nobody has repeated it with modern data.

• Selection bias: the profiles on this site exist because their subjects succeeded; the returned missionary selling alarms in Ohio on a 60-hour week has no Wikipedia page.
• The state does a lot of the work: a 5 percent flat income tax, a 4.65 percent base sales tax, and a first-place "economic outlook" score from the Rich States Poor States index for 19 straight years to 2026.
• Most members are not in Utah and not in business: 17,887,212 members at the end of 2025, more of them outside the United States than inside, with attendance estimates of 30 to 40 percent.
• The mission is a smaller filter than it looks: Pew's 2011 sample found 27 percent of members had served at all, 43 percent of men and 11 percent of women.

So the honest answer has two halves. Missions, tithing, a cheap business school full of bilingual 24-year-olds and a corridor of companies that hire them do produce a lot of competent, steady managers, and the record of Marriott, Dell, Citigroup and JetBlue is not an accident. But the same mechanism produces a lot of pest control salesmen, and the state that houses both would rank well with or without a church. The question worth asking is not why members do well in business. It is why the one measurable input, the mission, has been tried by only 27 percent of them.