On a Long-Term Roll

People warn you about Jeff Bezos’s laugh. It’s a surprising, high-pitched outburst (think Tom Hulce’s Mozart in Amadeus ) that can throw off an interviewer. But Amazon’s CEO has earned the right to guffaw. Sure, authors have accused him of being a bully in the company’s battles with publishers, and the new Fire Phone has yet to catch on. But Bezos is still on a roll. He has consistently defied skeptics and delivered for investors—to such an extent that he’s number one on HBR’s 2014 list of the world’s 100 best-performing CEOs. The list measures long-term performance according to a formula that tracks a company’s shareholder return over an executive’s tenure. Although the rankings can’t reliably take account of many hard-to-measure attributes that are critical to executive performance—customer satisfaction, employee engagement, community relations, and so on—they are a valuable guide to who is delivering results year after year. Amazon has produced a total shareholder return (industry adjusted) of 14,917% in the 18 years since Bezos was officially named CEO. Meanwhile, at HBR we’re taking steps of our own to enhance long-term performance. We’re about to relaunch our website, hbr.org, to deliver a more premium reading experience and better functionality. For example, subscribers and registrants can take advantage of My Library, a new feature that will let them seamlessly save, organize, and share their favorite articles. We’re tweaking the magazine as well. The front and back sections have been redesigned to make things (we hope) cleaner, clearer, and more appealing. We will be routinely connecting newly published pieces to our archive of timeless ones, and we’re adding elements, often presented by business leaders on the front lines, that focus on how to put our ideas into practice. We’ve also introduced a contributors page, to let you know more about our authors and to supply some context for their research and ideas. Over the coming months we’ll be incorporating other changes online and in print. We look forward to hearing what you think of them.

On a Long-Term Roll

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