Pablo Isla of the Spanish fashion retail giant Inditex has topped an annual global ranking of the 100 best-performing CEOs for the second year in a row.
The list, published by the Harvard Business Review (HBR), puts Bernard Arnault of LVMH in the #3 spot, followed by François-Henri Pinault of Kering (#4). Also making it into the Top 100 are Nike’s Mark Parker (#14), Fast Retailing’s Tadashi Yanai (#35), Nordstrom’s Blake Nordstrom (#62), and Next Plc’s Simon Wolfson (#97).
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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,” says HBR editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius.
To compile the list, HBR looked at CEOs of the S&P Global 1200 as of 30 April 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 #29 in the ranking. But Inditex’s strong ESG performance, which makes up 20% of each CEO’s ranking, vaults him to the #1 spot.
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By GlobalDataAmazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos ranks #68 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.
