Harvard Business Review recently came out with their list of
the top 100 best CEOs in the world, and the results are intriguing. The HBR judged CEO’s based on their return on
shareholder investment and how much their firm’s market value increased, among
other requirements.
This year, there was considerable turnover in the top
100. About half of the CEOs on the 2013
list are different than he 2010 list.
Some of that was that more CEOs were included in the 2013 study,
including international corporations.
Because of this, several newcomers to this list include those from other
countries.
Among them were Lars Sorensen, CEO of Novo Nordisk, and Li
Jiaxiang of Air China. But while China
has been rapidly growing over the last decade, the CEOs there are not
succeeding as well as their U.S. counterparts.
On average, however, U.S. CEOs did not do as well as their Latin
American, Indian, or British counterparts.
One of the most interesting results of the data was that it
showed that over 74% of the surveyed CEOs were insiders and, overall, CEOs that
had been hired from within rather than without did better. In the US especially, outsider CEOs did not
usually deliver the goods as well as insider CEOs.
MBAs seem to still be useful, as the study found that the
average MBA ranked 40 places higher than the average non-MBA. But while many have theorized that having a
company do good philanthropically or environmentally could help CEOs succeed,
the data doesn’t seem to support that theory.
But that wasn’t true across the board, as CEO’s like Franck Riboud of
Danoe was able to both succeed financially and receive high ratings in his
company’s CSR. Alessandro Carlucci, of
Natura also was able to pull together successful results.
Check out the complete list of the top 100 CEOs, and more of
the HBR’s evaluation of the data here.
