Business

The best-performing CEOs in the world 2018

Staff Writer

 ·27 Oct 2018

Harvard Business Review has published its annual global ranking of the 100 best-performing CEOs, with Pablo Isla of the Spanish fashion retail giant Inditex topping the list for the second year in a row.

Following behind Isla in second and third spots are Jensen Huang of NVIDIA and Bernard Arnault of LVMH. They’re joined by newcomers to the top 5 this year, François-Henri Pinault of Kering (#4) and Elmar Degenhart of the German automaker Continental (#5).

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has climbed to sixth spot, up from 12 in 2017.

The list, which appears in HBR’s November-December issue, is different from other leader rankings in that it measures performance for the entire length of a chief executive’s tenure. “In a business environment that often seems obsessed with today’s stock price and this quarter’s numbers, our ranking takes the long view,” said HBR editor in chief Adi Ignatius.

To compile the list, HBR looked at CEOs of the S&P Global 1200 as of April 30, 2018, and calculated overall shareholder return and increase in market capitalisation over their entire tenure.

It also factored in ratings of corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance provided by two firms, CSRHub and Sustainalytics.

Isla has been running Inditex, whose brands include Zara, Massimo Dutti, and Pull&Bear, since 2005. Measured on financial returns alone, Isla comes in 29th in the ranking. But Inditex’s strong ESG performance, which makes up 20% of each CEO’s ranking, vaults him to the number one spot.

The world’s richest man, Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos ranks 68th on this year’s list. Based on financial performance alone (that is, disregarding the ESG component of the rankings), he has been the top-performing leader since 2014, when HBR began publishing the list in its current form.

Only six CEOs have appeared on the list every year since 2013: Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon; Pablo Isla of Inditex; Blake Nordstrom of Nordstrom; Paolo Rocca of Tenaris; James Taiclet Jr. of American Tower; and Renato Alves Vale of CCR.

Information technology is the most highly represented industry, with 22 executives on the list. 34 CEOs on the list have an engineering degree and 32 have an MBA. On average, they became CEO at age 44 and have been in office 16 years.

The top performing CEOs in the world in 2018:

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