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The Harvard Business Review has released its annual list of the world’s top Chief Executive Officers for 2019. Topping this year’s list is 56 years old Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA an American technology company. In the words of Robin Sharma “Leadership is not about a title or designation. It’s about impact, influence, and inspiration.” What makes the 100 men and women that make up these top-ranking lists unique is the fact that they have faced an array of outside forces-demanding customers, profit hungry investors, savvy competitors, political and economic turmoil. Nonetheless, their companies have managed to perform remarkably well.
According to Stephen
Hahn-Griffiths of the Reputation Institute (a reputation measurement and
management services firm involved in coming up with the ranking of the top
CEO’s), one of the qualities that pushed up some CEOs in this year’s rankings
is the issue of corporate responsibility. He goes on to say “There was a time
and a place when it was good enough for leaders to deliver on financial
performance, new products, and innovative agendas, but that paradigm has
changed,” he explains. “Social responsibility, employee responsibility, and
environmental responsibility—that’s 32% of the weight of reputation of any
given CEO.” In a Forbes article of May 2019, an example is given of one CEO who
has been able to rank high again this year, Estee
Lauder CEO, Fabrizio Freda. On becoming CEO of Estee Lauder in 2009, Freda
was faced with a big branding challenge, which was convincing millennials that
Estee Lauder has something to offer them. He realized that re-branding would
not yield the results they wanted so he implemented a global reverse-mentoring
program to promote perpetual learning and development for employees and
prioritised the hiring of more Millennials, who now reportedly make up 67% of
the Estée Lauder workforce. Such shifts have enabled the company to make
attention-grabbing moves on the global stage.
Another top performing CEO, is Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, not only is a
top CEO but he is one of the richest men in the world and has managed to make
Amazon the second most valuable company in the world. His success can be attributed
to the risk he decided to take when he was 30 years old. It was while serving
as a vice president at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw in the 1990s that Bezos came
up with the idea to sell books over the Internet. Doing so, though, would mean
taking a significant risk and perhaps sacrificing his stable job. A risk which
he ended up taking with the willingness to either fail or win without any
regrets. Other world renowned top ranking
CEOs that you may be familiar with are the following (in no particular order):
The question now is what these
top CEOs could possibly have in common that sets them apart from other CEOs.
According to Forbes, the following
are 7 personality traits every CEO should
have in order to remain successful in the long run:
Becoming a great CEO takes hard work
and dedication. The ones we admire did not just wake up great but it took
dedication and in some cases failure in order to reach the great heights they
have reached.
Tatenda
Sayenda-Havire is a consultant at Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd a
management and human resources consulting firm. Phone +263 4 481946-48/481950
or email: tatenda@ipcconsultants.com or visit our website at
www.ipcconsultants.com
This article was written by one of the consultants at IPC
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