You must graduate from an elite college or business school. In fact, only 7% of the CEOs of today's companies went to a top school -- and 8% didn't graduate college at all. Given how cuthroat the competition to get to the corner office, you can never suffer a career detour or make a major mistake. In fact, on average, people who have become CEO's have had five to seven career setbacks on their way to the top. In fact, however, there are over 6 million CEO's of companies in America today with under 500 employees. And the overwhelming majority of those CEO's did not go to Harvard, attend Wharton or Stanford Business School, or the University of Chicago. Some are immigrants; many worked their way up through the ranks from entry-level positions. They DO however, share certain attributes, as Botelho and Powell have discoverd over the years from their work with CEOs and by mining their company's research and data banks. The people who become CEO's are decisive -- they may not always make the best decision, but they make the best decision they can based on the information they have at the time; they are reliable -- they deliver exactly what they promised to deliver, on time, without exception.