# data[].attributes.body
This is one of my cites for the Module 2 assignment on comparing and contrasting three companies ethics or diversity policies. I decided to go with Publix, Target, and Walmart because I'm always trying to decide which one is over all better for me to purchase my groceries at. This is link aout the bad press Target in California got over a diversity issue.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Target Accused Of Discrimination Over Awful 'Multi-Cultural Tips' Memo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Former Target employees are suing the retailer for discrimination over a memo that allegedly had racist commentary about Hispanic workers.

# data[].attributes.body
I to be honest I was not too fond of this weeks module assignment. Only because while doing my research for the paper and the diagram I couldn't find as much information on the topics I chose to elaborate more on my subject. I know that is probably my fault because I could have chose different companies to compare and contrast but I just felt like I could still find something good the whole time until I was actually typing out my conclusion. Don't get me wrong I promote diversity not only in the workforce but hopefully the next module will strike me in a more enthusiastic way.

# data[].attributes.headline
Module 2- Interesting Interviews for the Second Week

# data[].attributes.subject
Module 2- Interesting Interviews for the Second Week

# data[].attributes.body
I have found the article I want to use for the Discussion Board this week. It is four separate interviews wrapped up into one article. The interviewees are four very different but successful business women. I really enjoyed the read and it has opened my eyes to the fact that the glass ceiling actually still does exist.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Amy Schulman

Executive vice president and general counsel; business unit lead, consumer health care, Pfizer

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Q.

What are some patterns you've noticed over the years about women at work, and things they could be doing better to advance their careers?

A.

One thing that happens at work is that women tend to hoard favors as if they were airline miles - you know, the hundreds of thousands of airplane miles that we're saving for when we really need them. But "when we really need them" may never come. The trips are not going to happen, and we'll be left with 800,000 airline miles.

There's a parallel at work. You need to spend political capital - be unafraid to introduce people, compliment somebody when it's deserved and stand up for something you really believe in, rather than just go with the flow. I don't mean being a perennial troublemaker, but it's about having conviction and courage. Spend that political capital you earn by being intellectually credible, by being a fighter for the people on your team when appropriate, and by arguing for principles that matter. Those are qualities that give you credit. If you're waiting for the perfect moment to spend that capital, you're going to be sidelined your whole career waiting to just kind of enter the ring.

Women can and should do a better job of helping one another to be in that transactional forum, and to get over the anxiety that we're going to be found wanting on the wrong side of that equation. We're undervaluing the role that we can play in the success of other people and the organization. So don't be afraid to spend some of that political capital. You have to be well prepared, you have to be smart, you have to be on time, you have to be responsive, you have to be respectful, you have to have principles. But once you have all those things and you've built a track record, don't wait for the perfect day.

Q.

Other things you have observed?

A.

There are some things around style that I've seen. I'm not a formal person, but I don't find myself responding very well when there's an assumption that there will be a connection by virtue of the fact that we share a gender. If somebody is trying to capitalize on the fact that I have said publicly that I support the advancement of women, and they use that as a proxy to gain access to me, I find that annoying.

The less subtle way of saying it is that trading on gender, in my mind, is impermissible as a man or a woman. Assuming that you're entitled to something by virtue of your gender strikes me as not fair or right. Having said that, there are clearly implicit biases and assumptions that follow you by virtue of your gender and your race. Workplaces need to be aware of those and do something to counterbalance those as institutions. Leaders need to make sure that the organizations we create, run and drive are receptive to that diversity of voices, in both tone and substance.

Q.

You spent two decades working in law firms before you joined Pfizer. Any observations about the challenges women face that are specific to law firms?

A.

In my early years as a young lawyer, much of what you're doing falls into the model of traditional female success, which is the "dutiful daughter." It's an expression from Adrienne Rich, and it means essentially "the good girl behind the scenes" - you're not transgressing the roles that are expected of you. A good law associate is organized, methodical, writes things that other people sign, prepares draft arguments that other people deliver and is in a kind of perpetual apprenticeship role.

That's often why law firms and other institutions say, "Gee, we have all these great women in the pipeline," but then they don't become partner. Part of that is about whether the women themselves are able to gracefully transition from being the dutiful daughter to a partner. But do the organizations reward and recognize the full range of behaviors?

Q.

So women and the companies they work for both have to help with that transition?

A.

It has to be both. One problem is that we say to women that you have to claim your voice. Don't make statements that sound like questions. Don't be afraid to speak up. Own the room. Speak with confidence. But to the extent that doesn't come naturally, women, in an effort to do precisely what they've been told, sometimes will over-occupy the space.

Think of all the things that make for a great leader and a great colleague - collegiality, a certain amount of self-effacement, a commitment to the team and the organization - but then we're also busy telling young women: Don't put yourself second. Don't subordinate yourself. Speak up. If you're not heard, speak again. We give really mixed messages, and we don't teach women exactly how to do that because it's not very graceful when somebody's trying to claim a room in a meeting.

What we have to do is teach strategies, because here's the thing about unwritten languages: whoever owns the language wins the conversation. We need to teach women the difference between a native tongue and a language. But institutions, conversely, need to be slightly more forgiving if you don't get the jargon right all the time. That's where the sweet spot of inclusion comes in.

Q.

You touched on the point of confidence earlier. Can you elaborate?

A.

For many guys, this is simpler because they're not as over-invested in the question of "Do I belong?" Everything is not a test. If you're not viewing interactions as a litmus test for whether you belong, you're going to act better. On the other hand, if you're looking all the time for that kind of validation, you're either going to be self-conscious or insecure, and neither of those is a recipe for success. What you want is the kind of inherent confidence that leads to grace. You want to be around people who are having fun and enjoying what they're doing.

Readers' Advice

The Times asked readers to give their advice to women early in their careers. Here are excerpts from a selection of more than 500 responses.

Lisa Price

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Q.

How do you think about the issue of women and leadership in the context of your own career?

A.

What makes my story a little bit different is that I'm the founder of a company. So you start out by yourself and then, if you're successful and fortunate, your business grows to the point where you have people coming on board who have different experience and expertise.

So I was sort of placed at the top of the mountain, if you will, and then felt that there were things I needed to learn and develop to feel comfortable sitting there. I used to sit at the table but not necessarily at the head of the table, because I felt there were things I needed to learn, and I wanted to be part of the team, and sit with the team.

I don't do that anymore. Now I sit at the head of the table. But I don't consciously say, "When I walk in the room, I'm going to make sure I'm at the head." I just sort of gravitated there naturally, and that's where I sit, because what I've learned is that, regardless of whatever little skill sets here and there that I might not know really well, I do know this brand better than anybody else. And that's the authority that I have, that's the voice that I have to be, and that's who they need me to be. Because the only person who can teach them the history and the DNA and the passion and the love and the blood and the sweat and the tears is me.

Q.

Other ways you grew more confident?

A.

The other thing I learned was that sometimes I would play it safe and not say too much in a group setting, for fear of maybe saying the wrong thing or because I wanted to have more private conversations. But what I realized was that people I didn't talk to regularly - one-on-one or day-to-day - didn't know what my vision was, or they thought I was really quiet, and that I wasn't as involved.

So I practiced just being more vocal, and making more of a point to go into everybody's office at some point, sitting down and connecting and talking about what's going on, so that they know what I want to do.

Q.

People often wonder about the differences between how men and women lead. What are your thoughts on that?

A.

I have seen a difference, from having male bosses and female bosses, and then running a company and having male and female executives. What I find interesting is that it's not across the board, as in, men are this way and women are that way. I've had women who can be very curt - "This is how we're going to do it." And then I've seen men who can be very nurturing. So I've seen both sides of it.

What I have noticed is that men can have a real serious debate about something and sound like they're just going at it, and you think they're going to walk out of the room angry at each other. And they go get a sandwich, and they're fine. They don't take it to heart. Women don't do that. If we're going at it, there might not be conversation for a couple of days, until the dust settles.

Q.

Anything else you've noticed in terms of the difference between men and women at work?

A.

One of the mistakes I've definitely seen women make is crying. And I'm an emotional person. I understand where the tears come from. And being a founder of a beauty company, I sometimes can have the luxury to get teary when I'm speaking passionately about something.

However, when you're speaking to your boss or your manager about an issue, and you're feeling overwhelmed, crying is not a good thing to do, because you don't necessarily know how it's being perceived by the person to whom you're speaking. I know from personal experience that the stigma never goes away. And you are enforcing a stereotype, unfortunately, that women are weak, and they're not as tough as men.

The other thing that can happen is that if your boss is a woman, you might think you can cry in front of her because she's a woman, and assume that she's going to understand. Maybe something is happening at home - you have a family member who's ill, or you're stressed - and you have a moment, and you break down in their office. That's O.K. But when it comes to a work-related issue, and you start to cry, it just comes across as really weak and not good.

When someone's done that in front of me, I feel that there's a phoniness in it. I think it's because I am a woman. So it's a little bit of "I know how this works. Don't do this. I know this game." Women know how tears affect certain people. Very few men will cry to get something that they want. There are some really snaky guys, but it's not something that a man will typically do.

Q.

So how have you handled this when people have done this with you?

A.

As much as it angered me, there was one person who was crying, and I didn't want to be heartless and just jump all over them. So I would talk to them about it later: "Please do not ever do that again. If you're that emotional about it, wait to speak, so that doesn't happen." I'm O.K. with people having a shaky voice. Sometimes that happens. You're having a difficult conversation, and your voice might get quivery. But don't cry. Just wait to have the conversation. You don't want to be known as that person, because then people are afraid to have a difficult conversation with you because they think, "Oh, she might cry."

Doreen Lorenzo

President, Quirky, a product development company

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Q.

How do you answer the question of whether women lead differently than men?

A.

I think women by their nature have better instincts and better intuition.

I also think women are better at team dynamics, because they don't have to be the alpha all the time. There's a whole set of soft skills with people dynamics, and women have a really good sense of how to get people to cooperate and work together.

Q.

Whereas with men ... ?

A.

I've worked with plenty of truly collaborative men, but I've also encountered those who weren't, and in those instances, they tended to take on an alpha-male dynamic. That's where you see the jockeying. I find that if men feel they can't be the alpha, that's when the fist-pounding and the chest-thumping and all sorts of stuff happens. You can watch it escalate so that people get their way, and that's a form of bullying. A lot of that goes on in the workplace today.

Q.

How did you overcome any gender-related roadblocks in your career?

A.

I ignored everything. I never wanted gender to be a reason I did anything or was successful, and so I ignored it all. I just plowed ahead. But I look at our daughters and women, and they're still struggling, and I've decided I've got to talk about this more because it's still an issue. It's not better. There's still a glass ceiling.

Q.

Why do you think that is?

A.

In certain instances, there's still this mentality of an old-boy network. For them, money and power defines them. It's who plays golf with you. Business is still very much done that way. You're still fighting uphill odds.

Q.

Other thoughts on why things don't seem to change?

A.

Girls are taught to be cooperative more than boys. I don't think girls get the tools they need in school to get that self-assuredness. In high school, girls want to be part of the tribe, so they're not stepping out of line. The boys are often the jocks, with much more bravado.

We still don't encourage girls to speak up, to use their voice, to use their instinct, to not be afraid, and teach them how to combat the bullying. How do you trust your inner soul? We don't address that at all in school. You have to believe in yourself, but I think many women don't. And you watch some men just take advantage of that.

Q.

You said you ignored any gender-related headwinds during your career. Were there moments that were hard to ignore?

A.

In some situations, with certain types of men, they try to undermine you with jabs. What I've seen, especially with some young women, is they'll fold. They can get very emotional. When I was 35, a woman told me, "Don't let your emotions get in the way." That was really good advice, because if you take emotion out of it, you begin to look at everything objectively. You begin to see the remarks for what they really are, and the people for who they are. There's a lot of corporate game-playing that goes on.

Q.

What kind of jabs did you hear?

A.

"You're really creative. Do you understand math?" "You're more of a touchy-feely person. What do you know about business?" Another was: "You've never done this before. I don't know that you can pull this off."

Q.

Hard not to take that kind of stuff personally.

A.

I think in my 20s, I couldn't have done that. In my 30s, I could say to myself: "That's interesting. Do I actually believe that about myself?" Then you can be objective about the comment. I'm not perfect at everything. I know there are faults, but let's be constructive about what needs to get fixed versus what doesn't need to be fixed.

Q.

You ran Frog Design, the innovation consulting firm, for many years until joining Quirky recently as president. What did you do at Frog to set the tone?

A.

We have women's groups within Frog. They'll meet after work, and they'll pick a topic. They might talk about how you overcome certain situations, and give people encouragement and real-life stories so they can feel like there's strength in numbers.

There's a lot of talking about being able to have their voices heard in a room where there are a lot of strong males. If you're treated like a secretary, what can you do? What are the steps you can take? Part of it is saying: "We're going to end the conversation now until you listen to me. If you can't listen to different opinions, we shouldn't be having this meeting."

You have control. You have power. Don't be afraid to use it. I think what happens with women is that it's unnerving to rock the boat. But if you say that the conversation is over, then you stop people in their tracks, because nobody wants to be thought of like that. Stop and make people think. The people at Frog are more enlightened, but some people can fall into old habits. You have to stop and make people think.

Q.

At Frog, you spent a lot of time flying around the world to meet with corporate clients. Let's say you walk into a big boardroom, and everyone at the table is a guy. How do you handle it if you're picking up bad signals?

A.

Some people will start picking up their phones and not paying attention to you. That's very common. What you have to do is just engage with the person at the top immediately. If you look somebody in the eye, it's really hard for them to dart side-to-side. So I'll use an icebreaker - about their family, what they like to do outside of work - and I'll engage them on that level. It's not catching them off-guard; it's engaging them at a human level as opposed to the bravado side that often comes with work.

Marjorie Kaplan

Group president of the Animal Planet, Science and Velocity networks

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Q.

Any moments early in your career that surprised you in terms of how you were treated by men in the workplace?

A.

I was in a brand-new job, working on a consulting team. We walked into a large conference room to meet with the client. There was a big conference table, with six guys around it. Smoking was still allowed back then, and half of them were smoking cigars.

My boss walked in ahead of me and I was far behind him, so there wasn't an opportunity for me to walk up to the guys around the table and introduce myself. The moment was lost, and the meeting was starting. But I was never introduced. I was probably 25 or 26, and my boss was significantly older. I think they all thought I was his girlfriend. I sat in that meeting the whole time with these guys smoking cigars, practically with their feet on the table. That was so humiliating. He didn't do it maliciously, but it was kind of casual sexism. I resolved that wasn't going to happen again, and I have told people that you need to be comfortable challenging those kinds of assumptions.

Q.

What are some other assumptions you've noticed?

A.

I've had what I think were very common experiences for women as I was coming up, which is the assumption that a guy who walks into a room wearing a suit was smart and able, and a woman was "to be determined." People in the room had to be disabused of their assumption that the man would be capable and intelligent, and it had to be proven that the woman was as able. It was just kind of a feeling that you had all the time.

Q.

Any patterns you've seen in the workplace that suggest differences between how men and women handle certain situations?

A.

I've seen both men and women who are uncomfortable with conflict, but I think it's particularly true of women. It can be a challenge for women in a work environment because sometimes you don't agree. Sometimes people behave in a way that makes you uncomfortable. You have to review people, and that's challenging if you don't like conflict. I've seen circumstances where the kind of feedback that a woman will give is quite different than the feedback the man understands. I've had circumstances myself where I've felt like I was being very clear about what I expected, and then I suddenly realized, wait a minute, this guy is not getting what I'm saying.

Q.

Why do you think that is?

A.

Gender stereotypes are always challenging, but I do think that in general women are more "other focused." That's a real value in business, and without a doubt it's been one of the reasons for the success we've had. Certainly I am other-focused. I'm very attuned to body language and getting what people are saying even when it's not verbalized. The flip side is that you often have to be really direct with guys - if you're not saying it to them, they're not hearing it.

Management is the hardest job. Everybody, myself included, needs coaching on managing. Again, I'm generalizing, but because women are thoughtful about people, sometimes the process of managing and providing constructive feedback becomes very lengthy. There's lots of conversation about who the person is as a person and what's really troubling them. It can go very deep into their lives. While that can be helpful sometimes, at other times it's useful to just be clear - this is the expectation, this is a job, and here's what you need to be able to do.

It's not always helpful to understand the person so well that you know why they're not doing the job. If you tend to be very aware of other people's feelings and motivations, there's a lot of identifying and understanding and discussion about that. Sometimes you can spend a lot of psychic and emotional energy on something, when it might be easier to just say: "Look, here's the line. You've got to make it across this line or you're not going to be able to stay here."

Q.

Any other surprising moments you've had later in your career that stemmed from the fact that you're a woman?

A.

I've had people say to me, "I wonder if you're too nice." Some of that is because I'm a woman. What I have said in response is: "I am nice. And I want to be nice. There's not such a thing as 'too nice.' But my expectations are high, and people do rise to my expectations. That's how I manage. I don't manage based on fear. I manage based on expectations."

It's easy for women to be read as too nice, too kind. But it's important to be able to make that choice. One of the values that I - as a person and as a woman - bring to the workplace is that I want to be nice at work. Niceness and kindness are not the opposite of ambition and drive. It is powerful to choose to be nice.

Q.

Going back to that first incident you described, when you weren't introduced at the meeting: What is your advice to women about handling a situation like that?

A.

First of all, if it happens to you, remember it, because you will have the opportunity to make sure it doesn't happen to somebody else. The other is to arm yourself before it happens, so that you're ready to walk into that room and insist on the introduction. When it happened to me, I was floored, because I did not grow up in a world like that. Knowing that it could happen, be ready for it. Make sure you're introduced. Do what a guy would do automatically. The third thing is to address it after the fact. It's O.K. to go to the person who should have introduced you and say: "I did not feel comfortable about this. I'd like to make sure this doesn't happen again."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Four Executives on Succeeding in Business as a Woman

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Amy Schulman Executive vice president and general counsel; business unit lead, consumer health care, Pfizer Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Q. What are some patterns you've noticed over the years about women at work, and things they could be doing better to advance their careers? A.

# data[].attributes.headline
Module 2- Women Moving Up the Food Chain

# data[].attributes.subject
Module 2- Women Moving Up the Food Chain

# data[].attributes.body
This weeks discussion board has been about gender roles and diversity in the work place. I'm not sure why but I really enjoy these topics...maybe it is because I can relate to them easily or the fact that I do feel strongly about these issues. I feel self conscious speaking about the gender role topic because I simply want to defend my response without coming across as an extreme feminist (extreme feminist make me really uncomfortable by the way). Not done with the reading or assignments yet but I just wanted to write on Padlet since it has been a while.

# data[].attributes.body
I took an online quiz on BBC website to see if my personality related more to emotions or abstract thinking.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC - Science & Nature - Leonardo - Thinker quiz results

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Questionnaire to see if you are a Renaissance person

# data[].attributes.headline
Module 1- Best Performing CEO's in America

# data[].attributes.subject
Module 1- Best Performing CEO's in America

# data[].attributes.body
I was doing some addition research this morning on who America has ranked as their top CEO's. On multiple websites Steve Jobs has been number one on the majority of them. The link below is to one of the websites I found most credible.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's no accident that chief executives so often focus on short-term financial results at the expense of longer-term performance. They have every incentive to do so. If they don't make their quarterly or annual numbers, their compensation drops and their jobs are in jeopardy. Stock analysts, shareholders, and often their own boards judge them harshly if they miss near-term goals. And without equally strong pressure to manage for a future that stretches beyond 90 or 180 days, CEOs' behavior is unlikely to change. Developing a simple yet rigorous way to gauge long-term performance is crucial; after all, in business, leaders default to managing what's measured.

Five years ago we launched a global project to address that challenge. But we wanted to do more than just devise the right metrics. Our goal was to implement a scorecard that would not only get people talking about long-term performance but also alter the way that boards, executives, consultants, and management scholars thought about and assessed CEOs. We wanted this innovation to shine a spotlight on the CEOs worldwide who had created long-term value for their companies, and we wanted to give executives around the world critical benchmarks they could aim for.

Three years ago, in the January-February 2010 issue of HBR, we introduced such a scorecard. It evaluated chief executives on their entire tenure in office. We used it to rank the performance of nearly 2,000 CEOs. This month we are publishing a new version of that analysis. We have expanded it along two important new dimensions-making the group of CEOs we studied truly global, and examining which CEOs and companies were able to do well not only financially but also in terms of corporate social performance.

Judging CEO Performance

For the most part, we used the same methodology that we did three years ago. (See the sidebar "How We Created the Scorecard.") We wanted to accomplish three things:

Assess the long-term performance of each CEO, from the first day on the job to the last.

(Or for CEOs still in office, until August 31, 2012, our last day of data collection.) To do this, we looked at how much total shareholder returns had changed over that time period (adjusting for country and industry effects), plus the overall increase in market capitalization.

Reflect the global nature of business.

In 2010 we drew candidates from the S&P Global 1200 and BRIC 40 lists; this year we worked with three other emerging-market indexes as well. The pool of CEOs studied increased by roughly one-third, from 1,999 in 2010 to 3,143 this year.

Be objective.

Other rankings use reputation and surveys, which tap into popularity and celebrity status, to score CEOs. Instead, we use only performance data-notably, total shareholder performance. Other metrics, such as sales, profitability, and innovation rates, are useful, too, but they differ by industry, which makes comparisons difficult.

We selected the CEOs we tracked from the following indexes:

S&P Global 1200, 1997-2010

S&P CNX 500, 1998-2010 (for India)

Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges, 1998-2010

MSCI Emerging Markets Latin America Index and AméricaEconomía 500, 2002-2010

To make sure we had reliable and sufficient data, we excluded CEOs who had assumed their role before 1995 or after August 31, 2010. (For example, Tim Cook of Apple is not eligible because he became CEO in 2011.) And we included only those whose tenure lasted more than two years. All told, we ended up with 3,143 CEOs from 1,862 companies, of whom 1,007 were still in office on the date we stopped measuring performance. The entire group represented 64 nationalities and came from companies based in 37 countries.

Metrics.

We pulled financial data from Datastream and Worldscope and calculated daily company returns for the entire length of each CEO's tenure (or until August 31, 2012, if the CEO was still in office). We calculated three sets of numbers:

Country-adjusted company returns.

We computed a company's total shareholder return (including dividends reinvested) for the CEO's tenure. We then computed the average return for other firms from the same country over the same period and subtracted that figure from the company's return. This measure thus excludes any increase in stock return that is merely attributable to an improvement in the general stock market of a country.

Industry-adjusted company returns.

We also deducted the average return for the industry, to exclude any increases that were the result of rising fortunes for the overall industry.

Market capitalization change.

We measured the change in the company's equity market capitalization over the CEO's tenure. We adjusted this figure for inflation in each country and translated values into U.S. dollars, using 2011 exchange rates. We added to this number the inflation-adjusted value of the dividends and shares repurchased, and subtracted the adjusted value of shares issued.

We then ranked all CEOs for each metric-from 1 (best) to 3,143 (worst)-and calculated the average of the three rankings for every CEO to create the final overall ranking. Using three metrics is a balanced and robust approach: While the first two metrics risk being skewed toward smaller companies (it's easier to get large returns if you start from a small base), the third is skewed toward larger companies.

Analysis.

We performed regression analysis on the data set of 3,143 CEOs. This allowed us to "control" for some factors and isolate the effect that one factor (such as having an MBA) had on a CEO's standing in the ranking. Significant effects are reported in this article.

Nana von Bernuth, project manager, led the effort to create and analyze the ranking.

Granted, one downside of using truly objective measures is that our ranking may not exclude CEOs who have disappointed stakeholders on dimensions where performance is more subjective. This can be especially challenging with CEOs from emerging markets where rules are still being established. But even though CEOs are held accountable in areas that shareholder performance cannot capture, it remains the principal standard by which they are judged.

Who's Up, Who's Down

The top 100 CEOs on our list performed exceptionally well. On average, they delivered a total shareholder return of 1,385% during their tenures and increased their firms' market value by $40.2 billion (adjusted for inflation, dividends, share repurchases, and share issues). The contrast between their results and those of the bottom 100 CEOs was striking: On average, the bottom 100 produced a total shareholder return of -57% and presided over a loss of $13.6 billion in market value.

It comes as no surprise that the best-performing CEO over the past 17 years was Steve Jobs of Apple, who was #1 on our 2010 list as well. From 1997 to 2011, Apple's market value increased by $359 billion, and its shareholder return experienced average compound annual growth of 35%. That remarkable accomplishment is likely to go unbeaten for a long time.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com has now climbed to the #2 spot, up from #7 in our 2010 list. Under his leadership, the company delivered industry-adjusted shareholder returns of 12,266% and saw its value increase by $111 billion. In recent years the online retailer has expanded aggressively into new segments such as cloud-based computing services, while working to get the most out of the markets it already occupies. Its revenue growth shows no signs of slowing: Sales increased by 40% in 2011.

Bezos Photography: Karem Moskowitz

Jeff Bezos's focus on consumers above shareholders has at times vexed Wall Street. But smart investors have stayed with his company. In 16 years as CEO of Amazon, the online retail giant he created, Bezos has delivered industry-adjusted shareholder returns of 12,266%, and the value of the company has grown by $111 billion.

Bezos took time to speak with HBR's editor in chief, Adi Ignatius, last November 26-Cyber Monday, which set an all-time record for online sales, a category Amazon practically invented. Edited excerpts from the interview follow.

HBR: When Amazon went public, in 1997, you wrote a letter to shareholders that said, "It's all about the long term." Did you feel you were challenging orthodoxy?

Bezos: We were trying to make sure we were correctly advertising the event. Warren Buffett once said, "You can hold a rock concert or you can hold a ballet. Just don't hold a rock concert and advertise it as a ballet." A public company has to be clear about whether it's holding a rock concert or a ballet, and then investors can decide if they want to opt in.

What does it mean from the perspective of a CEO to think long-term?

If you're long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned. In the short term, that's not always the case. We have other stakeholders, too-our employees, our vendors. We take it as an article of faith that if we put customers first, other stakeholders will also benefit, as long as they're willing to take the long-term view. And a long-term approach is essential for invention, because you're going to have a lot of failures along the way.

You've said that you like to plant seeds that may take seven years to bear fruit. Doesn't that mean you'll lose some battles to companies that have a more conventional, two- or three-year outlook?

Maybe so, but if we had always needed to see significant financial results in two or three years, then some of the most meaningful things we've done would never have been started-like Kindle, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Prime.

How much do you care about your share price?

I care very much about our shareowners, so I care very much about our long-term share price. I do not follow the stock on a daily basis, because I don't think there's any information in it. The economist Benjamin Graham once said, "In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine. In the long term, it's a weighing machine." We try to build a company that wants to be weighed, not voted on.

Does it make sense for Amazon to stay in the hardware business, which is a low-margin, low-profit area for you?

Our approach is to sell our hardware-our Kindle devices-at near breakeven. Then we have an ongoing relationship with customers who buy content from us: digital books, music, movies, TV shows, games, apps. We aren't trying to make $100 every time we sell a Kindle Fire, so we don't have to get you on the upgrade treadmill.

You have said that you would be interested, if you had the right concept and approach, in creating a physical Amazon retail experience. Why even consider that?

We like to build innovative things, but only if we can put our own unique twist on them. If we could find something differentiated that we thought customers would like, it would be superfun.

Would developing a phone fall into that innovative category?

Yeah, absolutely.

Who do you fear is your biggest challenger?

We don't get up every morning wondering, "Who are the top three companies that are going to try to kill us?" I know of companies that do that in their annual planning processes, and the competitive zeal motivates them. We do pay attention, but it's not where we get our energy from.

Disruption is a rough business. Do you have any personal regrets about the pain your success has caused traditional retailers?

I'm as sentimental as the next person. I have lots of childhood memories of physical books and things like that. But our job at Amazon is to build the best customer experience we can and let customers choose where they shop.

At what point will the goal change from lowering margins and building market share to making a bigger profit?

Percentage margins are not something we seek to optimize. We want to maximize the absolute-dollar free cash flow per share. If we can do that by lowering margins, we will. Free cash flow is something investors can spend. They can't spend percentage margins.

Amazon has done a great job of self-cannibalizing its revenue streams-going from Amazon Store to Amazon Marketplace, from print to e-books, and so on. In most companies, moves like those would be hard to execute without organizational turmoil. How have you managed the transitions?

When things get complicated, we simplify them by asking, "What's best for the customer?" We believe that if we do that, things will work out in the long term. We can never prove that. In fact, sometimes we do price-elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. But we don't, because we believe that by keeping our prices very low, we earn trust with customers, and that this will maximize free cash flow over the long term.

What have you learned about leadership from running what has become a very big company?

If you're inventing and pioneering, you have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. One early example is customer reviews. A book publisher told me, "You don't understand your business. You make money when you sell things. Why do you allow negative reviews?" And I thought, "We don't make money when we sell things; we make money when we help customers make purchase decisions."

How do you institutionalize the ability to come up with these good, misunderstood ideas?

First, there are stories we tell ourselves internally about persistence and patience, long-term thinking, staying focused on the customer. Second, we select people who, when they wake up in the morning, are thinking about how to invent on behalf of the customer. If you like a more competitively focused culture, you might find us dull. We find our culture intensely fun. We have an explorer mentality, not a conqueror mentality.

You've generated a lot of attention recently. Is all the publicity good for you and for Amazon?

I have to be choosy-I do very little. But I do interviews because I want customers to understand what makes us tick, how we operate, what our principles are. I think customers want to know who they're doing business with.

And if you don't talk, how in the world can we misunderstand you?

Oh, believe me, that wouldn't stop it.

The highest-ranked woman on the list is Meg Whitman, currently the CEO of beleaguered HP, whose performance as the CEO of eBay from 1998 to 2008 earned her the #9 spot. Overall, only 1.9% of all the CEOs we studied were women.

There was considerable turnover in the top 100-this year about half (43) of the CEOs are new to that list since 2010. The change happened largely because in creating the 2013 ranking, we examined a bigger, more international sample of CEOs. To make the top 100 in 2010, CEOs had to rank in the top 5% of the executives in the study; this year they had to land in the top 3.2%. The majority of newcomers to the top 100 are from emerging markets, not surprisingly, but eight U.S. CEOs made the cut for the first time.

One notable new name is Lars Sørensen, the CEO of Novo Nordisk, a company that made its name selling insulin for diabetics. He shot up from #233 in 2010 to #20 in our current ranking. After Sørensen took over the company, in 2000, he spent 10 years and $500 million expanding the sales force to make it truly global. When all his competitors were investing in diabetes pills, Sørensen shut down Novo's pill research and instead focused the company on its core competency-insulin and other injected diabetes medications, notably prefilled insulin "pens" that eliminate the hassle of using a vial and syringe. His bet that sales would continue to grow in the wake of a worldwide diabetes epidemic has clearly paid off.

Even industries that have gone through tough times in recent years have seen some exceptional results. Airlines, for example, have not been doing well, but Air China, under the leadership of Li Jiaxiang (#17 on our list), bucked that trend. During his tenure, from 2004 to 2008, the company's total shareholder return was 1,022 percentage points higher than the average for its industry peers, while its market capitalization rose by $37 billion. With his guidance, Air China obtained a 50% share of the market in major Beijing airports and joined the largest airline alliance in the world.

The World of CEOs Is Not Flat

With a truly global sample to study, we can do a better job of comparing countries and regions. This is a significant advance; for decades most analysis of CEO performance has been U.S.-centric. Now we're able to examine data country by country-and we find real differences when we do.

China has been the growth miracle of the past decade, so you might expect CEOs there to have done very well. We find that the opposite is true: Among the 3,143 CEOs we analyzed, the average rank of Chinese executives was 176 places lower than the average rank of U.S. executives. Only three Chinese companies' CEOs made the top 100, though 17% of all the executives studied were from China. The Chinese leaders we asked about this discrepancy theorized that as the country's companies become more innovation-focused, their performance will improve.

Likewise, the average rank of Japanese CEOs was 562 places lower than that of their U.S. counterparts, although this is not a big surprise, since Japan's economy has struggled for many years. On the whole, U.S. CEOs did not shine either, despite holding six of the top 10 slots. Their average rank was 215 places lower than Latin American CEOs', 140 places lower than Indian CEOs', and 137 places lower than British CEOs'. Continental European and U.S. CEOs ranked about the same. U.S. CEOs have not been as competitive on a global scale as one might think.

One bright spot is Brazil, whose CEOs make up only 4.5% of the total sample but 9% of the top 100. They include Roger Agnelli of Vale (#4) and Embraer's Maurício Botelho (#11). Botelho took over the state-owned company in 1995, when it was reporting losses of around $300 million a year, and over the next 12 years, built it into a world-class competitor. (Interestingly, Brazil is also overrepresented in the bottom 100, suggesting that companies from that country play a high-risk, high-reward game.) Another standout is Mexico, whose average CEO ranked 108 places higher than the average U.S. CEO.

The national and regional differences get even more interesting as we turn to the question of why some CEOs got better results than others.

What Accounts for Success?

Our 2010 article looked at several factors that might be relevant to good performance (whether CEOs were hired from inside the company, had an MBA, and so on). We tracked those factors again, and our global comparison revealed some insights into differences across the world.

The insider-CEO story.

Management thinkers have long debated whether it is better to appoint an insider as CEO or get someone from the outside to run the company. But most studies have focused on U.S. corporations.

In our full sample of 3,143 CEOs, 74% were insiders. India had the lowest proportion (63%) and Japan the highest (90%). Overall, insiders did better than outsiders; the insiders' average rank was 154 places higher than the outsiders'. This is similar to what we found in the 2010 global ranking. It didn't hold true, however, in major parts of the world. Insiders got better results in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Latin America, but there was no difference between insiders and outsiders in continental Europe, China, and India.

What about the idea that outsiders are preferable when a company is in trouble? We find that boards-especially in the United States and Europe-do have a slightly greater tendency than normal to hire outsiders when the company is underperforming (measured as having an industry-adjusted total shareholder return of -24% or worse for the two years before the CEO started). But the results those outsiders produced varied by region. In the United States they didn't get better performance from struggling companies than insiders did. In Europe outsiders did better; the average rank of those who took over subpar performers was 370 places higher than the average rank of their insider counterparts.

In Latin America, however, the picture was different: The average rank of insiders who had taken the helm of poor performers was 750 places higher than that of outsiders who had. Regional factors help explain this disparity. A large number of Central and South American firms are family controlled; another large segment is government controlled. Business families-and, in some cases, governments-exercise a strong influence on long-term strategies and investment decisions, which makes it more difficult for a CEO who is new to a company to operate.

The upshot: In the United States, outsider CEOs usually do not deliver the goods, whether the company is underperforming or not. But this finding can't be generalized to other parts of the world. Boards need to keep regional success factors firmly in mind when selecting CEOs.

The curse of great prior performance.

If you want to create a lot of shareholder value, it pays to take over a company that hasn't been doing well-at least if you're in the United States, China, India, or the United Kingdom. In those countries a poorly performing predecessor is often followed by a high-performing one. But there is no such effect in continental Europe, Japan, and Latin America.

A truly stringent standard of excellence takes into account not only what results CEOs deliver over the long term but whether they've positioned their companies to succeed after they've left the helm. Here are the CEOs whose companies did very well over their entire tenure (in the top 10% of our 3,143 CEOs) and also during the three years after their departure. Many CEOs are not eligible for this list, of course, because they are still in office or because three years haven't passed since they left.

At the top of this ranking we find Tim Koogle, who was the CEO of Yahoo from 1995 to 2001. His successor, Terry Semel, increased the company's market value by $24 billion from 2001 to 2004.

1. Tim Koogle

Company Yahoo, United States

Industry Information Technology

Tenure 1995-2001

Country-Adjusted TSR Tenure 566% Post-tenure 1,041%

Industry-Adjusted TSR Tenure 559% Post-tenure 1,076%

Market Cap Change Tenure +14B Post-tenure +24B

2. V.S. Jain

Company Steel Authority of India, India

Industry Materials

Tenure 2002-2006

Country-Adjusted TSR Tenure 788% Post-tenure 1,759%

Industry-Adjusted TSR Tenure 843% Post-tenure 1,925%

Market Cap Change Tenure +10B Post-tenure +13B

3. Pangal Jayendra Nayak

Company Axis Bank, India

Industry Financial Services

Tenure 2000-2009

Country-Adjusted TSR Tenure 2,149% Post-tenure 3,217%

Industry-Adjusted TSR Tenure 1,984% Post-tenure 2,674%

Market Cap Change Tenure +4B Post-tenure +4B

4. José Eduardo de Barros Dutra

Company Petrobras, Brazil

Industry Energy

Tenure 2003-2005

Country-Adjusted TSR Tenure 58% Post-tenure 243%

Industry-Adjusted TSR Tenure 201% Post-tenure 1,329%

Market Cap Change Tenure +67B Post-tenure +183B

5. Márcio Artur Laurelli Cypriano

Company Bradesco, Brazil

Industry Financial Services

Tenure 1999-2009

Country-Adjusted TSR Tenure 36% Post-tenure 268%

Industry-Adjusted TSR Tenure 645% Post-tenure 1,206%

Market Cap Change Tenure +41B Post-tenure +29B

6. Yun Jong-Yong

Company Samsung Electronics, South Korea

Industry Information Technology

Tenure 1996-2008

Country-Adjusted TSR Tenure 1,559% Post-tenure 471%

Industry-Adjusted TSR Tenure 1,437% Post-tenure 380%

Market Cap Change Tenure +128B Post-tenure +17B

7. David Thompson

Company Teck Cominco, Canada

Industry Materials

Tenure 2001-2005

Country-Adjusted TSR Tenure 235% Post-tenure 423%

Industry-Adjusted TSR Tenure 244% Post-tenure 422%

Market Cap Change Tenure +8B Post-tenure +14B

8. Chee Onn Lim

Company Keppel Corporation, Singapore

Industry Industrials

Tenure 2000-2008

Country-Adjusted TSR Tenure 237% Post-tenure 511%

Industry-Adjusted TSR Tenure 324% Post-tenure 756%

Market Cap Change Tenure +5B Post-tenure +9B

9. José Sidnei Colombo Martini

Company CTEEP, Brazil

Industry Utilities

Tenure 1999-2009

Country-Adjusted TSR Tenure 2,288% Post-tenure 2,205%

Industry-Adjusted TSR Tenure 2,001% Post-tenure 3,484%

Market Cap Change Tenure +6B Post-tenure +2B

10. Subir Raha

Company Oil & Natural Gas, India

Industry Energy

Tenure 2001-2006

Country-Adjusted TSR Tenure 729% Post-tenure 394%

Industry-Adjusted TSR Tenure 915% Post-tenure 512%

Market Cap Change Tenure +57B Post-tenure +13B

The greater continuity in company performance in Latin America is probably a reflection of the long-term control exercised by business families, investor syndicates, and governments, whose visions don't change even as CEOs come and go. In Latin America those parties generally make the important bet-the-company decisions and policies, while CEOs are mainly responsible for execution.

An MBA degree.

In the wake of the financial crisis, MBAs were accused of being value destroyers. We supplied the debate with some contrary data in 2010, showing that the average MBA ranked 40 places higher in the study sample than the average non-MBA. We saw similar results in this year's list. In this case, we did not discover that CEOs of certain nationalities benefited more from an MBA than others.

Industry.

In general, industry differences count for very little in our analysis, explaining only about 5% of the variation in CEO performance. That said, the high-tech industry is overrepresented in the top 10, with five CEOs, including Amazon.com's. CEOs from the energy industry, who make up only 5% of the group studied, are overrepresented in the top 100, where they occupy 15% of the slots.

Doing Well and Doing Good

Many management thinkers argue that it is no longer enough to do well financially; companies also need to improve the well-being of (or at least not harm) the communities in which they operate, the environment, and their employees. (See, for example, "Creating Shared Value," by Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer, HBR January-February 2011.) That's the good news. The bad news is that stellar performance on both dimensions is no common or easy feat.

This year we examined the correlation between the financial performance of leaders on our list and their social and environmental performance as measured by MSCI, a highly reputable firm that rates major companies. Despite all the rhetoric, we discovered that the correlation between the two sets of data is, well, zero. You can see this clearly in the exhibit "Does Doing Good Help CEOs Do Well?" Companies are scattered all over this chart. Though many articles suggest that responsible corporate behavior-say, in sustainability-will automatically improve your bottom line, clearly it's not as simple as that. Some companies probably aren't managing with such issues in mind. Some may not have attractive social or environmental strategies; some may have misalignment between those strategies and the overall corporate strategy; and some may have incomplete measures of social or environmental practices.

This chart maps the long-term financial performance of some 1,100 CEOs against their companies' social and environmental performance for their last two years in office. As the relatively even scattering of points across the chart shows, there is no overall correlation between financial results and social responsibility. However, the chart does reveal numerous role models, who excelled in both areas.

Socially Responsible CEOs on the Rise

Four CEOs whose firms received high ratings for social responsibility moved into the top 15% of financial performers in the 2013 study, joining role models from Natura and Danone.

But the chart did reveal outliers. Five percent of the CEOs for which we had sufficient data fell into the box at the top right; they delivered great financial performance year over year and performed strongly on social and environmental dimensions. It is a rare achievement, indeed, but it is possible.

These trendsetting CEOs are the new role models for leaders pursuing the paradigm of creating shared value. One example: Franck Riboud of Danone, a French multinational with $27 billion in annual sales. Danone's excellent financial performance earned him a spot in the top 10% of this year's sample (a truly amazing achievement for a consumer goods company); at the same time, the company received extremely high ratings from MSCI. Another outlier is Natura's Alessandro Carlucci (who made the top 6% for financial performance), a leader among CEOs who believe that alleviating poverty and inequality and protecting the environment are intimately tied to their business agendas. Carlucci and Riboud have both confronted the key social or environmental issue in their industry (in Danone's case, obesity and unhealthful food consumption; in Natura's, deforestation and poverty) and redirected their company's strategy to tackle it.

We also looked at CEOs whose companies had high social and environmental performance in 2010 but whose financial performance kept them out of the top 15% of the group studied that year. Since doing both well and good can be a long-term strategy, we wanted to see whether any of those CEOs had then moved into the top 15% of the current financial ranking. We found four: the leaders of Adidas, Inditex, Hermès International, and Eaton.

At Adidas, CEO Herbert Hainer oversaw the implementation of a triple-bottom-line philosophy, a massive push to slash the company's carbon footprint, and the increased use of recycled polyester as well as sustainably farmed cotton in products. One of Adidas's latest sustainable innovations is DryDye technology, which removes the need for water in the dyeing process. At Eaton, Alexander Cutler has embedded sustainability into the company's culture and practices. The diversified power management company develops innovative products and processes, such as hybrid electric and hydraulic power trains and electric power control systems, that help customers and consumers conserve resources and reduce their carbon footprint.

This new breed of leaders not only rejects the idea that financial market demands are more important than stakeholders' needs but also demonstrates that companies can excel at meeting both. These CEOs have shown the way, and others can learn from them.

We don't foresee a time in the near future when measures of social performance will be as objective as the measure of long-term financial performance we've developed. That said, we will continue to track how CEOs are doing in the two areas, with the aim of encouraging leaders to shine in both. Everyone in the business world seems to agree that executives should be less obsessed with quarterly earnings and more focused on the long term-everyone, that is, except the decision makers who hire and fire executives and the people who buy and sell company stock. The short-term emphasis won't change until a new paradigm for evaluating performance emerges. Talk alone won't bring about that change; we also need a whole new method of evaluating CEOs. Here, we're proposing two key improvements: a robust, objective measure of leaders' performance over their full terms in office, benchmarking all chief executives of major global companies; and an assessment of the correlation between a firm's financial results and its environmental and social practices. We hope that boards of directors, pension funds, hedge funds, and other shareholder activists will use these measures to better evaluate CEOs and to guide the selection of tomorrow's leaders.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The knock on most business leaders is that they don't take the long view-that they're fixated on achieving short-term goals to lift their pay. So which global CEOs actually delivered solid results over the long run? The 2013 version of the CEO Scorecard provides an objective answer.

# data[].attributes.body
I just completed the first few chapters as well as the Case Assessment Analysis for Module 1. I actually very surprised but I enjoy the book. It's pretty easy to understand and doesn't make me want to fall asleep very other sentence. I have never taken a course that has pre and post "test" but it made me pay attention and I feel as if I actually learned something. I can take the context out of the book and not only apply it to my career but my life outside of work. Looking forward to reading up on the next few chapters.

# data[].attributes.body
I've looked into Steve Jobs previously but the videos supplied in the Discussion Board has allowed me to become more open minded to the different types of managers there are. I took a Technical Support class last semester when I was trying to get my Programming degree and there was a whole chapter in the required reading of the many different types of managers that you man encounter in the work industry. I always assumed there were only one type or at least one style of managing that was considered "most effective" but I suppose that was a little naive of me to assume. I have always believed that regardless of Jobs's slight impatience towards other he made a successful leader but I stumbled upon this quote when I was doing more research on him today and it made me realize that he had no reason to change because he fully believed in himself and his cause. So nothing else mattered. At least, that is what I take from it. "Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me... Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me." -Steve Jobs