Ex-Fortum boss Mikael Lilius among top 100 CEOs listed by Harvard Business Review

Mikael Lilius

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The Harvard Business Review has placed Fortum’s former CEO Mikael Lilius in 21st place on its list of the top 100 CEOs worldwide.
      According to the HBR, the growth in the market capitalisation of Fortum was approximately USD 18 billion or EUR 12.6 billion over Lilius’s tenure from 2000 to 2009.
      The profit to the owner or the company’s dividends and appreciation together grew by nearly 800%.
      CEO Steve Jobs of Apple tops the list of the best-performing CEOs in the world, while the second best is Yun Jong-Yong, the CEO of Samsung Elecronics. The third is Aleksei B. Miller, the CEO of Gazprom.
     
The ranking shows which CEOs of large public companies performed best over their entire time in office - or, for those still in the job, up until September 30th, 2009.
     
The factors under scrutiny included the development of a company’s market capitalisation, the industry-adjusted returns on investment, as well as the owners’ profits, taking into account variations in the wide diversity of countries.
      The magazine notes that one reason to analyse the performance of CEOs over their entire time in office was the fact that short-term economic thinking has been named as one of the underlying factors behind the financial crisis.
      Moreover, some experts say that paying short-term performance-related bonuses to directors has led to excessive risk-taking.
     
For the ranking, data was collected on close to 2,000 CEOs worldwide. The CEOs were picked from the US credit rating company Standard & Poor’s list of 1,200 companies and from the BRIC 40 index, representing the largest companies in Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
     
The ranking included those CEOs who had started in the job in 1995 or afterwards, but not those who had taken up their jobs after 2007, which is why a number of prominent figures, including the American investor Warren Buffett and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates - who both started in their jobs prior to 1995 - did not feature in the list.
     
Among the 2,000 CEOs were executives from 48 countries, while the companies involved were located in 33 different countries.
      The average age of the CEOs was 52 years, and only 1.5% of the CEOs were women. Just one woman, Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, made it to the top 100 of the rankings.
      Furthermore, only 15 per cent of the CEOs were working outside their own native countries. In other words, international mobility in executive labour markets continues to be rather insignificant.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  New Fortum board to consider position of CEO Lilius (7.4.2009)
  Announcing retirement, Fortum´s Lilius says decision-makers shirk responsibility (3.4.2009)

Links:
  Harvard Business Review: The Best-Performing CEOs in the World

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