Who was the best CEO of 2023? - The Economist | How big is the role of luck in career success? - The Economist | Would you rather be a manager or a leader? - The Economist | Pity the modern manager—burnt-out, distracted and overloaded

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Who was the best CEO of 2023? - The Economist

It has been a tricky year atop the corporate ladder. Sluggish growth in many markets has set bosses scrambling to rein in costs just as inflation has spurred their workers to demand hefty pay rises. Fractious geopolitics and toxic culture wars have left corporate chieftains feeling like tightrope-walkers. The craze for generative artificial intelligence (AI) has had them fretting over looming technological disruption, too.

Still, for some chief executives 2023 was a vintage year. To determine who did it best, The Economist has examined the performance of bosses of large listed companies in the S&P 1200 index, which covers most big economies bar China and India. We put aside those who have been in the job for less than three years, to avoid giving too much credit for replacing an inept predecessor. We then ranked the remaining chief executives by the returns they generated for shareholders relative to their sector’s average. The top ten by that measure included both household names and relative dark horses.

Among the top ten were bosses of two companies—Cameco, a Canadian miner, and PulteGroup, an American homebuilder—whose stellar results were thanks mostly to macroeconomic forces (a surge in uranium prices and a slump in sales of existing homes, respectively). We left them out. Also on the list were the chief executives of two buy-out firms, 3i and Melrose Industries, whose results were more a testament to the performance of the bosses running their portfolio companies than the financiers on top. We excluded them, too. Last, we also removed Richard Blickman of BE Semiconductor Industries, a Dutch maker of chipmaking tools. His pay was rejected by shareholders—not a good look for any chief executive.

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How big is the role of luck in career success? - The Economist

Luck plays a big and often unacknowledged part in career success, starting in the womb. Warren Buffett has talked of winning the “ovarian lottery” by being born in America when he was, and being wired in a way that pays off in a market economy. Good looks are associated with higher pay and a greater chance of being called to interview in hiring processes. Your experience of discrimination will reflect your circumstances of birth.

The early way-stations in a career are often marked by chance: a particularly encouraging boss, say, or an assignment that leads you off in an unexpected but defining direction. Luck can affect the pathways of the most rational-minded professions. A paper published in 2022 by Qi Ge of Vassar College and Stephen Wu of Hamilton College found that economists with harder-to-pronounce names, including within ethnic groups, were less likely to be placed into academic jobs or get tenure-track positions.

Names can work against economists in other ways. Another study, by Liran Einav of Stanford University and Leeat Yariv, now of Princeton University, found that faculty with earlier surname initials were more likely to receive tenure at top departments, an effect they put down to the fact that authors of economics papers tend to be listed alphabetically.

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Would you rather be a manager or a leader? - The Economist

If you were asked to imagine a manager, you might well conjure up someone comically boring, desk-bound and monotonal. Now do the same for a leader. You may well be picturing someone delivering a rousing speech. A horse may be involved. You almost certainly have different types in mind. There is indeed a distinction between managers and leaders, but it should not be overdone.

Various attempts have been made to pin down the differences between the two, but they boil down to the same thing. Managers, according to an influential article by Abraham Zaleznik in the Harvard Business Review in 1977, value order; leaders are tolerant of chaos. A later article in the same publication, by John Kotter, described management as a problem-solving discipline, in which planning and budgeting creates predictability. Leadership, in contrast, is about the embrace of change and inspiring people to brave the unknown. Warren Bennis, an American academic who made leadership studies respectable, reckoned that a manager administers and a leader innovates.

Some of these definitions might be a tad arbitrary but they can be useful nonetheless. Too many firms promote employees into management roles because that is the only way for them to get on in their careers. But some people are much more suited to the ethos of management, as we explore in our new podcast, “Boss Class”. They are more focused on process; they like the idea of spreadsheets, orderliness and supporting others to do good work. Shopify, an e-commerce firm, has created separate career paths for managers and developers with these differences in motivation in mind.

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Pity the modern manager—burnt-out, distracted and overloaded - The Economist

MANAGERS DO NOT make for obvious objects of compassion. It is hard to feel sorry for the bossy office lead, let alone the big-shot chief executive who pockets millions of dollars a year in compensation. Yet their lot deserves scrutiny and even some sympathy. From the corner office to the middle manager’s cubicle, the many demands on their time are intensifying.

A recent survey of workers in 23 countries by Adecco Group, a recruitment and outsourcing firm, found that 68% of the 16,000 managers in the sample suffered burnout in the past 12 months, compared with 60% for non-managers, and up from 43% the year before. “I feel like I jumped on a treadmill where someone controls both the incline and the speed,” says a big-tech executive with a sigh. Plenty of his peers share the sentiment. Managers increasingly require literal stamina: recruiters report that firms often ask candidates for executive positions how much they exercise.

That is a problem not just for the haggard individuals, but also for their employers and, given the boom in management jobs in recent decades, whole economies. Today America has 19m managers, 60% more than in 2000. One in five employees at American companies manages others.

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