John Rau (business executive)
American businessman; CEO of Chicago Title, 1997–2000

John Rau (1949/1950–2025) was an American business executive. A four-time CEO, he advised corporate leaders and was the Poling Chair of Business and Government Leadership at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.
Education
Rau attended Boston College as an undergraduate. He received a Master of Business Administration from Harvard University, where he was a Goldman Sachs Fellow.
Career
Rau was a chief executive officer four times. At the age of 35, he was the youngest of the top 100 bank presidents in the United States. Rau was CEO of Exchange Bank, selling it to ABN Bank for $450 million in 1989. ABN's LaSalle Bank then appointed him CEO, with Rau stepping down in 1991, but staying on ABN's North America board until it sold LaSalle to Bank of America for $23 billion in 2007.
After LaSalle Bank, Rau became the dean of Indiana University's Kelley School of Business. He was also a visiting scholar at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management from 1992 to 1993, and counsel to the firm of McKinsey & Company.
“John Rau (business executive)” enters the record as american businessman; CEO of Chicago Title, 1997–2000. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, business and executive can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Rau (business executive)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.