GE, IBM Cede ‘CEO Factory’ Honor to Accenture, PWC and Deloitte

General Electric. Procter & Gamble. IBM.

For years, those companies and a handful of others were held aloft as “CEO Factories,” admired for their ability to recruit and mold corporate chiefs. Over a 20-year span, just three dozen companies produced one-fifth of the chief executives in the entire S&P 1500 index.

Those factories, many of them sprawling global conglomerates, were leadership proving grounds where promising young recruits got shuttled from one challenging role to the next, and where running a business unit or geographic region inside of them was equal to steering a full-sized firm. The companies invested millions in training programs like GE’s famed Crotonville campus, which ...