Who Is Most Likely to Grow up to Run a Company?

What a difference a couple of months could make. Have your baby in March or April and you can start measuring for drapes in that corner office. She's going to be a natural leader. But give birth in June or July and the poor guy's going to have a tough slog if he wants to end up as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. That's what researchers found when they gathered information about 375 CEOs of the world's top companies between 1992 and 2009.

The top five CEO-producing months were March (12.53%), April (10.67%), November (10.67%), January (10.13%) and October (9.87%). On the other hand, the study found that you're least likely to become the big cheese if you were born in June or July. It seems largely to do with the cut-off dates for starting kindergarten -- June and July babies are usually the youngest in the class. The thinking is: Kids born just before the cut-off date for an academic year may be at a disadvantage because they can be nearly a full year younger than some of the other children in their group.

More on summer babies:

• Because the younger children in a class might be less intellectually mature, they might be less likely to excel right away. As a result, they might be less likely to be chosen for leadership roles, such as being class president or captain of the football team.
• Outcomes for children born in August are mixed, based on whether parents hold a beginning student back a year. Most academic year cut-off dates fall between 1 September and 1 January, so an August child could be the youngest or the oldest.
• One of the study's co-authors concluded, "We could be excluding some of the business world's best talent simply by enrolling them in school too early."