Steve Jobs Named Best-Performing CEO, Worldwide
Steve Jobs by Dylan Roscover
So what if Time magazine passed him over for person of the year: Steve Jobs beat out a couple thousand CEOs around the globe to be named the best-performing CEO by Harvard Business Review.
Researchers looked at what execs brought to the table and to shareholders from 1,999 publicly-held companies worldwide during the entire time of their tenure.
Though they admit “it may come as no shock that Steve Jobs of Apple tops the list,” it does seem a little surprising that Bill Gates is absent. No shocker: Gates is out of the running because the research only considered execs who took the helm from 1997 on.
Even without Microsoft, tech execs took the lion’s share of the top 10, including Yun Jong-Yong at Samsung Electronics (ranked 2), John T. Chambers, Cisco Systems (ranked 4), Jeff Bezos from Amazon (7), Margaret C. Whitman eBay (8) and Eric E. Schmidt Google (9).
So what put Jobs ahead of the pack?
Killer numbers. Researchers were looking at country-adjusted return, industry-adjusted return and change in market capitalization during tenure.
Steve Jobs delivered a “whopping 3,188% industry-adjusted return (34% compounded annually) after he rejoined Apple as CEO in 1997, when the company was in dire shape. From that time until the end of September 2009, Apple’s market value increased by $150 billion.”
Shareholder’s probably appreciate that more than a Time magazine cover, anyway.
Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco native who has lived in Milan and Florence, Italy. She's written for Wired.com, The New York Times and Newsweek. You can find her on 
