[fjtorres]

Summary:

http://www.geekwire.com/2014/harvard...ing-ceo-world/

Full report, listing the 100 best CEOs:

http://hbr.org/2014/11/the-best-perf...the-world/ar/1

Notably, the only media CEO on the list is Bob Iger (Disney) at 60 and nobody from publishing.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon have been taking it on the chin on Wall Street and elsewhere over the company’s lack of profits. But a new ranking from the elite Harvard Business Review offers a completely different perspective, crunching nearly two decades of financial data and naming Bezos the best-performing CEO in the world.

How is that possible? The ranking looked not at profits, specifically, but at the broader measure of shareholder return, which includes the increase in the company’s market value, driven by its share price.

It wasn't even close:

Writes HBR’s Daniel McGinn, “The company’s stock performance since its 1997 initial public offering has been so strong that its share price could have dropped to $250, and Bezos would still rank as HBR’s best-performing CEO.”

The article goes on to offer a view of Bezos in stark contrast with popular opinion.

The other big misconception: that Bezos doesn’t care about profitability. By all accounts Amazon’s mature businesses (such as online retail) are profitable; it’s his deep investments in new businesses that create accounting losses, which he regards as a false measure of performance.
“He’s really focused on cash flow and what kind of return on invested capital is being created,” says Warren Jenson, Amazon’s chief financial officer from 1999 to 2002.
Bill Miller, a fund manager at Legg Mason who has held shares in Amazon since it went public, says Bezos shows deep understanding of the point Clay Christensen made in his recent HBR article “The Capitalist’s Dilemma,” which argued that most managers focus on the wrong financial metrics. “Jeff really takes theory seriously—he started out wanting to be a theoretical physicist,” Miller says. “In terms of financial theory, he’s trying to get away from the behavioral problems that afflict other companies” that try to maximize the wrong numbers.
Other Bezos watchers go even further: At a time when many large companies (most notably Apple) are hoarding idle cash, shouldn’t we be lauding Amazon’s ability to continually find entirely new industries to reinvest and innovate in, rather than criticizing the losses driven by those outlays?

HBR also looked at intangibles and reputation and ended up with a different list... with Bezos only slightly lower at number 4:

Someday, we hope that there will be equally concrete ways to account for “intangibles”—environmental impact, employee satisfaction, customer engagement—so that we can confidently add that data to the formula. Until then we can only supplement this list with parallel data that tries to track some of these “softer” attributes.

Along those lines, we asked the Reputation Institute, a reputation management consultancy, to rank our top 100 CEOs in terms of these other skills—work environment, citizenship, governance, leadership, and so on. The results suggest, I’m afraid, that doing well doesn’t correlate much at this stage with doing good. That said, a few superstars scored high across the board, including Bezos, who, despite Amazon’s well-publicized entanglements with publishers and authors, was #4 on the Reputation Institute list.

Disney and Discovery were the only media companies to crack this list.

Finally, on the company reputation metric:

Bezos wins again. We can probably chalk the dual achievement up to his constant pursuit of a clear vision: to be “the most customer-centric company in the world.” Still, it presents a marvelous irony. The leader most adamantly ignoring Wall Street pressure creates the most value—and the company that spends next to nothing on advertising and PR ends up with a great reputation.

Doesn't look like neither Bezos nor Amazon is going away anytime soon.