• Harvard Business Review, Tuesday, December 22, 2009 10:52 AM

Morton T. Hansen, Herminia Ibarra and Urs Pyer say that Apple's Steve Jobs has been the best CEO of a large public company who assumed the job no earlier than January 1995 and no later than December 2007. In fact, he's such a hands-down no-brainer, they admit that it's no surprise. What may be surprising is just how stellar his performance has been. On average, the top CEOs delivered a total shareholder return of 997% (adjusted for exchange-rate effects); Jobs has delivered a 3,188% industry-adjusted return since rejoining the fast-sinking Apple as CEO in 1997.

Rounding out the Top 10 of the Top 100 are: 2. Yun Jong-Yong, Samsung Electronics (South Korea); 3. Alexey B. Miller, Gazprom (Russia); 4. John T. Chambers, Cisco Systems (U.S.); 5. Mukesh D. Ambani, Reliance Industries (India); 6. John C. Martin, Gilead Sciences (U.S.); 7. Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon.com (U.S.); 8. Margaret C. Whitman, eBay (U.S.); 9. Eric E. Schmidt, Google (U.S.); 10. Hugh Grant, Monsanto (U.S.).

Notably absent from the list -- "snubbed is the way that the "Microsoft Blog" at Seattlepi.com puts it -- is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. No wonder. Performance has been pretty much flat since he took over in 2000, Nick Eaton graphically points out.

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