The Latest List Of The World’s 100 Best CEOs Has One Very Conspicuous Absentee
Every year, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) puts together a list of the top 100 CEOs in the world. And in this year’s list, there’s no room for the man who took the number one spot on that list in 2014.
That man is Jeff Bezos, CEO of ‘the’ Amazon and still the world’s richest man (even though his pole position on the world’s rich list came under threat recently).
HBR named NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang, as the best-performing CEO in the world for 2019, who ranked No.2 only last year. He was joined by Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Francois-Henri Pinault of Kering, Richard Templeton of Texas Instruments, and Ignacio Galan of Iberdrola, in the top five.
HBR’s Best-Performing CEOs list for2019 had 100 names in it but none of those names was Jeff Bezos, the Amazon chief missed out entirely.
Bezos took the number one spot in HBR’s 2014 ranking and has remained on the list until this year. HBR attributes his sudden disappearance to a change in ranking methodology.
HBR says it ranks CEOs based on financial performance as well as environmental, social, and governance measures (called “ESG,” collectively). Whereas ESG comprised 20 percent of the total CEO score in years past, it became more important in 2019. ESG now comprises 30 percent of the total CEO score, which effectively took Bezos out of the list.
According to HBR, Amazon has a low ESG score; it cites Sustainanalytics, which attributes the low score to “risks created by working conditions and employment policies, data security, and antitrust issues.”
In any case, other companies with CEOs in the top-third of the list include Adobe, Mastercard, Microsoft, LVMH, L’Oral, Nike, JP Morgan Chase, BlackRock, and Cisco.
It is also important to note that some CEOs included in the list have left their roles, with Mark Parker of Nike and Anders Runevad of Vestas making good examples.
However, HBR acknowledged that women CEOs are “underrepresented” on the ranking. Only four women CEOs made the list this year and HBR says this number highlights “how few women are in the c-suite and is not indicative of performance.”
According to HBR, these are the top 10 best-performing CEOs in the world for 2019:
- Jensen Huang
NVIDIA - Marc Benioff
Salesforce.com - François-Henri Pinault
Kering - Richard Templeton
Texas Instruments - Ignacio Galán
Iberdrola - Shantanu Narayen
Adobe - Ajay Banga
Mastercard - Johan Thijs
KBC - Satya Nadella
Microsoft - Bernard Arnaut
LVMH
Featured Image Courtesy: KornFerry
