The CEO Power Forum: The Best of the Best

Deck: 
Five electric utility chiefs are showing true leadership for their companies and for an entire industry.
Fortnightly Magazine - May 15 2003
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Five electric utility chiefs are showing true leadership for their companies and for an entire industry.

Who are the best-of-the-best chief executive officers (CEOs) in the power industry? Fortnightly magazine wanted to know. After an almost unending parade of accounting scandals, credit downgrades, and overall corporate malfeasance that shook the industry to its foundation, true leadership is needed now more than ever. But just what is true leadership, and how do you measure it? Peter F. Drucker, a famed guru and authority on corporate management, has said that effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not attributes. Certainly, the CEOs profiled in Fortnightly's 2003 CEO Power Forum are leading companies with financial results that should be the envy and example to all of the utility industry.

We asked SNL Financial, the independent energy information and research firm, to analyze the sector and generate a list of profitability metrics for the 10 largest firms by equity market value (see below), which became the basis for our selection of this year's best-of-the-best CEOs. Then, the Fortnightly editors selected from the top companies those CEOs who, to paraphrase another Drucker maxim, did the right things in addition to showing stellar financial results:

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