Monday, October 12, 2015
Lars Sørensen, the CEO of Denmark-based Novo Nordisk, sits atop the 2015 Harvard Business Review rankings due to his company's high-ranking sales and stock price. But his standing also reflects Novo Nordisk’s deep engagement with social and environmental issues, which now factor in to HBR calculations. In the past, HBR considered only financial metrics. This year, recognizing that past rankings "failed to account for the many aspects of leadership that go beyond mere market performance," HBR incorporated environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance, as calculated by the investment research firm Sustainalytics. ESG was weighted at 20 percent of CEOs’ overall performance when developing the final rankings.