Employees judge a chief executive by leadership. Politicians judge one by jobs and investment. Investors judge one by shareholder returns. The Financial Times has now built a tool that scores Britain’s biggest company bosses on all of it at once, and under its default settings, Rolls-Royce’s Tufan Erginbilgiç comes out on top.
The FT’s new CEO Performance Ranking scores the chief executives of Britain’s largest listed companies across nine measures: shareholder returns, analyst ratings, executive pay, workforce characteristics and sentiment in the FT’s own coverage among them. The tool is interactive. Readers can reweight each category themselves, so someone who cares only about stock performance sees a different leaderboard than someone who weighs reputation and leadership more heavily.
Across the ranked group, CEOs have beaten the market by about five percentage points a year on average during their tenures. The past 12 months look far less uniform. Companies exposed to artificial intelligence, power infrastructure and commodities have posted some of the strongest returns, while others with solid operational records have lagged behind. Some of that gap has nothing to do with management. Segro, Intertek and Beazley have all drawn takeover interest recently, which lifted their share prices independent of anything their chief executives did. It is a real limitation of any ranking built on market data: share prices move on sector trends and investor sentiment as much as on boardroom decisions.
Under the FT’s default weightings, the highest-scoring leaders share a few traits. They are younger, averaging around 56, and tend to attract more neutral press coverage rather than polarised commentary. Notably, the CEOs with the strongest overall scores also scored relatively poorly on employee satisfaction, a reminder that what pleases shareholders and what pleases a workforce do not always move together. Longevity tells its own story too. Next’s Simon Wolfson and Computacenter’s Mike Norris have each led their companies for more than two decades. Wolfson has delivered annual returns roughly nine points above the market over his tenure, though his overall ranking is held back by weaker scores on scale and valuation relative to US peers.
What’s next
The FT is explicit that these results reflect one set of assumptions, not a verdict. Because the tool lets readers change the weighting themselves, the ranking will keep shifting as more people decide for themselves which measures actually define a good chief executive.
