Viewed in Harvard Business Review
The business world is comprised on an abundant number of companies.
Some are run by very high profile chief executive officers (CEOs) whose names have become synonymous with high-level business performance of iconic businesses with household brand identity.
Others, of course, are less known. Yet very few efforts have been made to assess the performance of these CEOs on an objective basis.
Harvard Business Review has for several years attempted to provide such a measurement of the world’s top CEOs.
It has done so again this year in its November-December edition, ranking CEOs on a hybrid of financial performance metrics and what Harvard Business Review has labeled “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) ratings, the latter of which accounted for 20 percent of the overall measurement in prior years but this year accounts for 30 percent of it.
This increased emphasis on ESG performance reflects a growing trend for increased focus on these factors of late.
The magnitude of this shift was perhaps best represented in Business Roundtable’s statement earlier this year, signed by 181 CEOs, that placed increased emphasis on these factors as core to the very purpose of a corporation.
The top five on this year’s “The CEO 100,” which reflect high levels of both financial and ESG performance, include Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, Francois-Henri Pinault of Kering, Richard Templeton of Texas Instruments, and Ignacio Galan of Iberdrola.
