The Best-Performing Ceos in the World
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
HBR.ORG NOVEMBER 2014 REPRINT R1411B THE BIG IDEA The Best-Performing CEOs in the World The knock on most business leaders is that they don’t take the long view—that they’re fixated on achieving short-term goals to lift their pay. So which global CEOs actually delivered solid results over the long run? Our 2014 list of top performers provides an objective answer. This document is authorized for use only by VILLAFANE ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. FOR ARTICLE REPRINTS CALL 800-988-0886 OR 617-783-7500, OR VISIT HBR.ORG THE BIG IDEA 100 The Best-Performing CEOs in the World The knock on most business leaders is that they don’t take the long view—that they’re fixated on achieving short- term goals to lift their pay. So which global CEOs actually delivered solid results over the long run? Our 2014 list of top performers provides an objective answer. November 2014 Harvard Business Review 2 This document is authorized for use only by VILLAFANE ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. 100THE BIG IDEA THE BEST-PERFORMING CEOS IN THE WORLD Leaders for the Long Term A few years ago I sat down with Starbucks founder Howard Schultz in his Seattle office to discuss the challenges of being a CEO. At one stage I asked whether he felt there was a disconnect between the person he would like to be and the persona he needs to project while running a public company. by Adi Ignatius Serving as a CEO, he said, “has been difficult—and The top CEOs have undeniably been effective. lonely.” Yet he’d found that it was indeed possible to The top 50, on average, have delivered total share- be values-driven while also winning Wall Street’s re- holder returns of 1,350% (adjusted for exchange-rate spect. “But the only ingredient that works in this en- movements) during their time on the job. That trans- vironment is performance—so we have to perform.” lates into an annual return of 26.2%. Adjusting for in- Schultz has delivered on both fronts. He has be- dustry effects, average total shareholder returns for come increasingly progressive, speaking out on top- the top 50 are 1,161%, and for country effects, 1,087%. ics ranging from presidential politics to gay marriage. We acknowledge, of course, that being a good CEO And though that might make some shareholders is about far more than just investment performance. cringe (and others applaud), he has resoundingly— Leading a company and creating value depend on and consistently—come through for investors. As many skills that are hard to measure—strategic vision, a result, Schultz has earned a spot (#54) on our list authenticity, long-term planning. And investors cer- of the 100 best-performing CEOs in the world. It’s tainly aren’t the only stakeholders that need tending a varied ranking, whose honorees represent 22 na- to; the best-run companies connect effectively with tionalities and countless personal values and styles. customers, employees, and the communities where Another Seattle-based CEO, Amazon founder Jeff they operate. Bezos, comes out as #1 (see “The Numbers in Jeff But we want this ranking to be as objective as pos- Bezos’s Head,” page 58). sible, so we’ve put a premium on what we can mea- How do you measure a CEO’s worth? We de- sure precisely. Someday, we hope that there will be cided to approach the task scientifically, basing the equally concrete ways to account for “intangibles”— ranking on hard data, not on reputation or anec- environmental impact, employee satisfaction, cus- dote. Specifically, we looked at the increase in total tomer engagement—so that we can confidently add shareholder return and market capitalization (see that data to the formula. Until then we can only sup- “How We Calculated the Rankings,” at right). We also plement this list with parallel data that tries to track focused on long-term—or at least longish-term— some of these “softer” attributes. results. Our rankings consider the performance of Along those lines, we asked the Reputation active CEOs over their entire stints, and we’ve in- Institute, a reputation management consultancy, to cluded only those who have been in their jobs for at rank our top 100 CEOs in terms of these other skills— least two years. (The median term for all the CEOs work environment, citizenship, governance, leader- we studied is seven years.) ship, and so on. The results (see the sidebar “Money 3 Harvard Business Review November 2014 COPYRIGHT © 2014 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This document is authorized for use only by VILLAFANE ([email protected]). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact [email protected] or 800-988-0886 for additional copies. FOR ARTICLE REPRINTS CALL 800-988-0886 OR 617-783-7500, OR VISIT HBR.ORG How We Calculated the Rankings To create the list of the best-performing CEOs in the world, HBR began with the companies that, at the end of 2013, were in the S&P Global 1200, an index covering 70% of the world’s stock market capitalization and comprising firms in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. We Isn’t Everything”) suggest, I’m afraid, that doing identified each company’s current CEO. To make sure that we well doesn’t correlate much at this stage with doing had reliable data and focused on long-term performance, we Leaders for good. That said, a few superstars scored high across excluded CEOs who had assumed their role before 1995 or the board, including Bezos, who, despite Amazon’s after April 30, 2012. We also excluded any executive who had well-publicized entanglements with publishers been convicted or arrested. All told, we ended up with 832 and authors, was #4 on the Reputation Institute list. current CEOs from 827 companies. (Several companies had the Long Term (Schultz finished in the middle of the pack.) co-CEOs.) Those executives represented 43 nationalities and What else do we know about the CEOs on this ran enterprises based in 30 countries. list? Most are men—only two women, Debra Cafaro Our research team, headed by of the three rankings for every CEO of Ventas and Carol Meyrowitz of TJX, made the Nana von Bernuth and assisted to create the final overall ranking. top 100—and the median age is 59. (This is similar by statistician Hyunwoo Park and Using three metrics is a balanced to what we see in the entire group studied, in which coders Peggy Lam, Michelle Kossack, and robust approach: While the 3% of CEOs were female and the median age was 58.) and Phachareeya Ratchada, pulled first two risk being skewed toward Thirteen CEOs are of nationalities that differ from financial data from Datastream smaller companies (it’s easier to their companies’. (Though it’s still not a global market and Worldscope and calculated get large returns if you start from for CEOs, that figure is more than double what it was daily company returns (including a small base), the third is skewed in the 2013 version of this ranking.) And while the top reinvested dividends) for each CEO toward larger companies. 100 have each experienced their own unique jour- from the first day that he or she took We also collected biographical neys to success, there do seem to be two preferred office until April 30, 2014. From this data on each CEO and performed data we calculated three sets of regression analysis on the data set. pathways. Over a quarter of the CEOs have MBAs, numbers: country-adjusted returns This allowed us to “control” for some and nearly as many had studied engineering. (See the (which exclude any increases in factors and isolate the effect that sidebar “Why Engineers Make Great Leaders.”) returns that are attributable merely one factor (such as having an MBA We also looked at CEO pay, to see how that related to an improvement in the local stock or an engineering degree, or being to performance. To do so, we worked with Equilar, a market), industry-adjusted returns a company founder) had on a CEO’s company that collects information on compensation, (which exclude increases that result standing in the ranking. to tally the most recent pay packages for the top 100. from rising fortunes for the overall HBR’s list of the world’s best- These elite CEOs are very well paid, as are most CEOs. industry), and change in market performing CEOs was conceived by But on average the executives on our list receive capitalization (measured in inflation- Morten T. Hansen, Herminia Ibarra, more of every form of compensation than their peers adjusted U.S. dollars, using 2012 and Urs Peyer. Previous rankings do. (See the sidebar “How They Stack Up on Pay.”) exchange rates). were published in HBR’s January– We then ranked all CEOs for February 2010 and January–February Disney’s Bob Iger, #60 on our list, is the high- each metric—from 1 (best) to 832 2013 issues, but the methodology est paid among our 100, with a total package of (worst)—and calculated the average has been updated for the 2014 list. $34.3 million. That doesn’t make him the world’s best-paid CEO. In fact, according to Equilar, 13 CEOs earned more, led by Charif Souki of U.S.