By Hank Boerner – Chair & Chief Strategist – G&A Institute
If you are a regular reader of these commentaries you will know that there are frequent references to the Harvard Business Review, the Harvard B-School, and prominent Harvard-affiliated voices.
The “HBR”, packed with management best practices content, is well-read by U.S. and global corporate leaders (circulation was beyond 300,000 [paid subscribers] in 2018 with more than 7 million unique visitors accessing content each month).
The magazine publishes an annual list of “The World’s Top Chief Executives”. The rankings, HBR editors explain, relies on objective performance measures over the CEO’s entire tenure, and are not rankings relying on short-term metrics or subjective evaluations.
Important: Since 2015 the rank is based not only on financial performance but also on the CEO’s companies’ ESG ratings.
Weighted ESG scores has accounted for 20% of each of the CEO’s ranking – and for 2019 rankings, this was increased to 30%.
As a result, Jeff Bezos of Amazon — the top CEO in the rankings since 2014 – was dropped in 2019 rankings because of the company’s low ESG scores.
ESG – Sustainability…matters!
The ESG data providers assisting the Harvard Business Review staff with rankings are Sustainalytics, now owned by Morningstar, and CSRHub.
Keep in mind well-regarded ESG / sustainability academics are part of the HBR ecosystem: George Serafeim, Robert Eccles, John Elkington, Andrew Winston, and others.
The 2019 rankings were:
#1 position, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA (classified as an IT firm, U.S.A. headquartered.
#2 – Marc Benioff, Salesforce, IT, U.S.A.
#3 – Francois-Henry Pinault, Kering, Consumer Goods, France.
#4 – Richard Templeton, Texas Instruments, IT, U.S.A.
#5 – Ignacio Galan, Iberdrola, Utilities, Spain
The story and 2019 list are available here: https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-ceo-100-2019-edition
These days we’re watching for the HBR Top 100 CEO list for 2020 – Stay Tuned!