Pablo Isla, de Inditex, nombrado mejor CEO del mundo

To compile our list of the world’s best-performing CEOs, we began with the companies that at the end of 2016 were in the S&P Global 1200, an index that reflects 70% of the world’s stock market capitalization and includes firms in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. We identified each company’s CEO but, to ensure that we had a sufficient track record to evaluate, excluded people who had been in the job for less than two years. We also excluded executives who had been convicted of a crime or arrested. All told, we ended up with 898 CEOs from 887 companies. (Several companies had co-CEOs.) They ran enterprises based in 31 countries.

Our research team, headed by Nana von Bernuth and assisted by the coders Christina von Plate and Phachareeya Ratchada and the data consultants Morand Studer and Daniel Bernardes of Eleven Strategy & Management, gathered each firm’s daily financial data from the CEO’s first day on the job until April 30, 2017, as compiled by Datastream and Worldscope. (For CEOs who took office before 1995, we calculated returns using a start date of January 1, 1995, because prior industry-adjusted returns were unavailable.) We then calculated three metrics for each CEO’s tenure: the country-adjusted total shareholder return (including dividends reinvested), which offsets any increase in return that’s attributable merely to an improvement in the local stock market; the industry-adjusted total shareholder return (including dividends reinvested), which offsets any increase that results from rising fortunes in the overall industry; and change in market capitalization (adjusted for dividends, share issues, and share repurchases), measured in inflation-adjusted U.S. dollars.

We then ranked each CEO—from 1 (best) to 898 (worst)—on each financial metric and averaged the three rankings to obtain an overall financial rank. Incorporating three metrics is a balanced and robust approach: While country-adjusted and industry-adjusted returns risk being skewed toward smaller companies (it’s easier to get large returns if you start from a small base), the change in market capitalization is skewed toward larger companies.

To measure performance on nonfinancial issues, HBR consulted with Sustainalytics, a leading provider of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) research and analytics that works primarily with financial institutions and asset managers, and with CSRHub, which collects, aggregates, and normalizes ESG data from nine research firms and works mainly with companies that want to improve their own ESG performance. We computed one ESG rank using Sustainalytics ratings and one using CSRHub ratings for every firm in our data set. To calculate the final ranking, we combined the overall financial ranking (weighted at 80%) and the two ESG rankings (weighted at 10% each), omitting CEOs who left office before June 30, 2017.

HBR’s list of best-performing CEOs was conceived by Morten T. Hansen, Herminia Ibarra, and Urs Peyer. Previous rankings were published in HBR in 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, but the methodology was updated in 2015.