Reliance Industries’ (RIL)chairman Mukesh Ambani is in the big league of world’s best performing CEOs ranked by the prestigious Harvard Business Review (HBR).
Ambani is the only Indian to be ranked as the fifth best performing CEO in the world with Apple’s Steve Job at the top of the pecking order.
Ahead of Ambani, to feature among top 50 CEOs, are Yun Jong-Yong of Samsung Electronics, Russian energy firm Gazprom’s Alexey Miller and John Chambers of Cisco Systems.
The RIL honcho is also ranked number two among the top 10 emerging market CEOs with Miller at the top. KV Kamath of the ICICI Bank, ranked number 9, is the other Indian to figure in the list.
The HBR ranked the CEOs of large publicly-traded companies in a study
conducted over 2,000 CEOs worldwide. The entire group represented 48 nationalities and companies based in 33 countries.
“On an average, the top 50 CEOs increased the wealth of their shareholders by $48.2 billion. They delivered a total shareholder return of 997% during their time in
office. That translates into a spectacular annual return of 32%.”
The Harvard Business Review puts Ambani in the list of “up-through-the-ranks leaders” along with the Samsung boss. “Among the up-through-the-ranks leaders on our list are Yun Jong-Yong, who joined Samsung straight out of college and worked there 30 years before becoming CEO, and Mukesh Ambani, who joined RIL in 1981, when it was still a textile company run by his father.
Jobs, it said, 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 straits. From that time until the end of September 2009, Apples market value increased by $150 billion.
“These CEOs may not all be household names, but here’s an objective look at who delivered the top results over the long term,” the Harvard Business Review said.
Jobs was followed by Yun Jong-Yong, who ran South Korea’s Samsung Electronics from 1996 to 2008. HBR said none of the top three CEOs had an MBA. Ambani and Chambers were the only two in the top five to hold degrees in business administration. The likes of Jack Welch, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates do not find mention in the list as HBR considered only CEOs who assumed the job between January 1995 and December 2007.
(With agency inputs)
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