Good morning.
Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies list is out this morning, and the top three on the leader board won’t surprise you: Apple (14th year in a row at #1), Amazon and Microsoft. Some of the others in the top 50 are less expected. You can find the full list here.
But here’s a result that may surprise. We asked the 3,800 corporate executives, directors and analysts who drive the survey: What CEOs do you think deserve more attention than they get. Satya Nadella won that “most underrated” contest for the fifth year in a row.
But second place went to Mary Barra, who led GM through the early days of the pandemic and then managed a return to profitability. Worth noting that the polling was completed before her surprising announcement last Thursday, which she shared with members of Fortune’s CEO Initiative, that GM has set an “aspirational goal” of eliminating all tail pipe emissions by 2035. GM may not excite investors as much as Tesla—which now has ten times GM’s market cap, even though it sold only one-fifth as many cars last year. But the understated GM CEO is getting some good reviews.
Because we are a journalistic organization, we also polled for the “most overrated” CEO. Top of the list? Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
And if you haven’t woken up yet this morning, read David Morris and Robert Hackett’s deep dive into the disturbing SolarWinds hack, and what business and government will have to do to fix it. Scary.
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
[email protected]
