Fortune Magazine’s Fortune 500 issue came out May 21, 2012. We thought we’d highlight a few things for you that we saw.

In addition to providing a list of the Top 500 Companies, they also sort and parse the data a number of ways, including sorting by Industries. Two industry segments we thought you might find interesting are:

Industry Sector: Engineering, Construction

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/industries/144/

Industry Sector: Real Estate

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/industries/164/

Just for kicks, we thought we’d see how many companies made the list in the Commercial Banks Industry

Industry Sector: Commercial Banks

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/industries/30/

That’s right, even after the turmoil, there are 20 “Commercial Banks” that made the Fortune 500 compared to nine for Engineering, Construction and two for Real Estate. By the way, Blackrock, who has a large real estate portfolio is in the Securities Industry per the Fortune 500 list.

BALANCED BOARDS

In addition to the lists, Fortune also profiled six boards – Estée Lauder, General Motors, eBay, New York City Ballet, Harvard Corp., and Whole Foods. It is always interesting to look at the make up of major corporations; especially the people from various unrelated industries that are tasked to provide guidance and direction for the company. The demographic make up is also intriguing, which brings us to Whole Foods. Maybe because they promote the organic life-style, or they are associated with great employee loyalty, or that one of their core values is “caring about our communities & our environment“; we just assumed they would have a pretty demographically diverse board. Well, we’ll let you make that determination, see below:

Whole Foods Market Board, in 2012 Fortune 500

With the heavy push for more diversity on corporate boards, the photo above was a surprise. Which of course got us to wondering about the Commercial Real Estate industry; what is the demographic make up of the REIT boards? Hmmm, we might have to investigate.