'Tis the time for the arrival of year-end “Top” lists—top innovations of 2005, top companies, etc. One caught our eye: the 2005 World's Most Admired Chief Executives study conducted by Burson-Marsteller with the Economist Intelligence Unit. The group polled 600 “business influentials” in sixty-five countries and asked them to list the CEO or chairman they admired most in the business world today.
Asking top executives to rate their peers created much different results from the common top–ten lists produced by the business magazines. For one thing, Bill Gates topped this poll, while the Microsoft maven didn't even merit a mention in BusinessWeek's recent “Best Leaders” list. As Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross, the Burson-Marsteller executive who crafted the study, commented, Gates' philanthropic efforts likely caught the eye of the other execs, and “leaders and their companies can no longer safely ignore the value placed on corporate responsibility and commitment by 21st century citizens.”
The end-result list of fifteen revealed some interesting conclusions. Nine of the executives commanded companies outside the U.S., eight were company founders, all had been with their company three years or more; and no women made the list.
For comparison, here are the leaders selected in the Burson-Marsteller poll, followed by the BusinessWeek list:
Burson-Marsteller: Gates, Jobs, Buffett, Dell, Branson, Browne, Ghosn, Murthy, Immelt, Murdoch, Bond, Chambers, Ollila, Leahy, and Mittal.
BusinessWeek: Jobs, Mulally, Semel, Lafley, Kim Shin Bae, Immelt, Watanabe, Levinson, and Zander.
What are we to take away from this? For BusinessWeek, the best leaders are those who are producing current bottom-line results for their companies. But for executives assessing their peers, short-term performance problems, such as those suffered at Dell, are more likely to be ignored in favor of longer-term performance and personal accomplishment.