Top 20 Best American CEOs of All Time

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BEST AMERICAN CEOs
A PERSPECTIVE

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BEST AMERICAN CEOs OF ALL TIMES
FOREWORD
Throughout the history of business, the failure or
success of a company relies on many factors, not the
least of which is the corporate savvy of the executive
running the show. In recent times, many CEOs have
come under fire for mismanagement of their
corporations, while some have been applauded for
successfully navigating a tough economy. With much
controversy surrounding CEOs of today, the question
stands: Who are the best American CEOs of all
time? Assembling a panel of professors from the top
business schools around the country, a survey was
done on the records of CEOs who best created (or
destroyed) value, innovation, while possessing the
best (or worst) management skills. From this, they’ve
formulated a list of the 20 Best American CEOs of all
time. Here they are.
As business leaders, historical
captains of industry and current
CEOs inspire generations of
entrepreneurs. They shape the
commerce worlds of their day and
beyond, influence political destinies -
and make beaucoup bucks in the
process.

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HENRY FORD
Drive, he said. And America listened. The father of
the modern moving assembly line changed the
world by selling his standard-issue Model T
cheap—the price was $260 in 1924—and creating
car lust. Ford also paid his employees well. In 1914,
in a controversial move, he doubled most wages to
$5 a day, which tamped down turnover, goosed
productivity, and cornered the market for top
engineers and mechanics. On the downside: He
was famously anti-Semitic.
THE STAT: Ford launched his eponymous car
company with just $28,000. By 1918, half the cars in
the U.S. were Model Ts. Now that’s a return on
investment!

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J.P.MORGAN
What do you call a man who personally bails out
the U.S. Treasury twice? Brilliant? Yes. Warren
Buffett? No. During the depression of 1895, John
Pierpont Morgan replenished the Treasury with $65
million worth of gold in exchange for government
bonds. He came to the rescue again during the
panic of 1907.
THE STAT: Morgan was so good at saving troubled
businesses that he got his own noun. In the early
1900s, the process of turning a firm around came to
be known as Morganization.

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SAM WALTON
He was a plainspoken hayseed. He liked dogs and
pickup trucks. He owned suits and ties, which he
proudly wore to church and to the office when he
had to. He didn’t live in a 46,000-square-foot
mansion. More than a decade after his death, the
operating culture of the world’s largest company
continues in his tradition. “What would Sam do or
think?” is a question Wal-Mart management still
asks.

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ALFRED SLOAN
Notoriously lax on auto safety and a unionbuster to
boot, Sloan probably wouldn’t have cut it in today’s
era of de rigueur air bags and making nice with the
UAW. But his turnaround of GM - which was
nearly bankrupt when he inherited it in 1923 -
ensured the company’s survival. Among his top
innovations: making each of GM’s brands into its
own separate unit and ordering designers to come
up with different cars for different demographic
groups—the first successful challenge to Ford’s
one-size-fits-all approach.
THE STAT: Sloan is credited with pushing the idea
of annual changes in style—a practice that led to
the development of planned obsolescence.

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LOU GRESTNER
At a time when quarterly write-downs in the
banking industry regularly top $10 billion, a
onetime restructuring charge of $8 billion seems
like chicken feed. But back in 1993, when Gerstner
inherited IBM, putting up that kind of figure
would’ve been a death knell. The CEO worked to
unite far-flung units and improve efficiency, and by
the time he left, he had created a company with a
net profit of $5.3 billion. One black mark: Because
Gerstner didn’t recognize the threat posed by
Microsoft, IBM lost ground in the software market.
THE STAT: In retirement, Gerstner is still under
contract with IBM; the consulting gig, worth up to
$2 million a year plus expenses, expires in 2012.

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JOHN D ROCKEFELLER
It’s hard to top Rockefeller as a monopolist or
philanthropist. While doling out dimes and nickels
to the poor, John D. built a sprawling empire by
squashing, undercutting, and buying up the
competition. Over a two-month period in 1872,
Standard Oil absorbed 22 of the 26 petroleum firms
in Cleveland, where the company was first
headquartered. By 1879, it had about 90 percent of
the market for refining petroleum and all but
complete control of the U.S. oil industry.
THE STAT: Rockefeller’s fortune peaked in 1912 at
$900 million ($19 billion in today’s dollars), but by
the time he died, in 1937, he’d given most of his
money away to heirs and charities.

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STEVE JOBS
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tries to explain the
seemingly unexplainable: how the most amazing
people got to be so amazing. His conclusion is that
extraordinary people like Bill Gates and the Beatles
aren’t mysterious freaks of nature, but the logical
products of considerable talent, good timing, and
precisely 10,000 hours of early training. Gladwell
claims that Steve Jobs fits into the scheme because
of his age (54, perfect for taking advantage of the
PC revolution that started in the 1970s) and the
neighborhood in which he was raised (Silicon
Valley).

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JEFF BEZOS
A few pointers from the Bezos school of leadership:
Micromanage, micromanage, micromanage. It’s a
strategy that has kept Bezos—one of the first to
recognize the potential of online commerce—in the
CEO seat since the Web 1.0 era. He’s also been
willing to make risky bets—from allowing other
retailers to sell via Amazon to offering free
shipping at the expense of profits in order to
increase market share—that have ultimately paid
off.
THE STAT: Amazon’s recession buster: the Kindle.
The wireless reading device did an estimated $75
million in sales last year and is expected to double
that figure in 2009.

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ANDREW CARNEGIE
Ah, the power of philanthropy! Carnegie, the iron-
and-steel baron, wasn’t as ruthless as some of his
fellow industrialists, but he still had a lot of
reputation mending to do upon retirement. After
selling Carnegie Steel in 1901 (it eventually became
U.S. Steel), the former CEO polished his image by
giving away most of his billion-dollar-plus fortune
to support libraries and promote world peace and
education.
THE STAT: The self-help book Carnegie inspired,
Think and Grow Rich, has been in print since 1937
and has sold more than 30 million copies
worldwide.

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BILL GATES
Fittingly, when you google Gates, you get almost
seven times as many results as you get for Goliath,
the Biblical giant famous for his battle with a
pipsqueak competitor. The co-founder of Microsoft
is said to be a cranky and impatient manager—an
approach that helped Microsoft earn $60 billion last
year. He is also known to be somewhat unfriendly
to competition. In 2001, to settle a massive antitrust
suit brought against Microsoft, Gates agreed to
share technical information with other software
makers.
THE STAT: In February 1998, as Gates was on his
way to a meeting in Belgium, a heckler hit him in
the face with a cream pie.

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MICHAEL BLOOMBERG
The mayor who would be king, or at least New
York City’s CEO for a term longer than originally
allowed by law, reached City Hall by spending
$155 million of his own money on two campaigns.
But that sum is a drop in the bucket for
Bloomberg’s $20 billion bank account. He earned
that fortune through his financial-software-services
venture, which makes money by charging a
monthly fee for each of the 290,000 terminals it
leases to clients.
THE STAT: Bloomberg started his business with the
$10 million severance package he received after
being fired from Salomon Brothers.

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RAY KROC
A century after the robber barons faded into the
sunset, Kroc, a milkshake-machine salesman, was
doing his business forebears proud. After initially
agreeing to pay the McDonald brothers $2.7 million
for the chain they founded, plus a royalty on 1
percent of gross sales, Kroc reneged. He never
honored the royalty agreement because it wasn’t in
writing. The result was a brand-new billion-dollar
industry: fast food.
THE STAT: Today, McDonald’s sells about 550
million Big Macs a year—contributing 297 billion
calories annually to the national diet.

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ANDY GROVE
Mr. Disrupter—he’s lately been pushing for GE to
develop an electric car and for Wal-Mart to try to
solve the health-care crisis—is the quintessential
outside-the-box thinker. But his passions have
backfired too. In 1994, Grove was so enamored of
Intel’s first Pentium chip that he sent it to market,
warts and all, which ended up costing the company
$475 million. No matter. Under Grove, Intel’s stock
rose from under $1 in 1987 to more than $20 a share
in 1998.
THE STAT: So just how many plug-in cars does
Grove think we should be driving? He calls for 10
million by 2011.

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WALT DISNEY
Imagine a world without Mickey. It could have
been. The animator and entrepreneur’s first studio,
Laugh-O-Grams, in Kansas City, Missouri, declared
bankruptcy after less than two years in business.
Disney bounced back in the mid-1920s and set up a
new studio in Hollywood. Today, the company
produces annual revenue of about $35 billion. As
for Mickey, he was inspired by a pet mouse Disney
had while he was working in a Kansas City studio.
THE STAT: Disney lifted the idea for his
amusement park—where he thought employees
would spend time with their kids—from Children’s
Fairyland, in Oakland, California.

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REUBEN MARK
Mark may have been boring as CEO—his big
innovation was to focus on the small picture rather
than on splashy initiatives—but he made Colgate
the king of oral care. Under his leadership, the
company rarely missed quarterly estimates, and its
stock performed twice as well as the S&P 500.
THE STAT: Mark once tried to get all 35,000
Colgate employees to wear ID tags with their first
names in big type to make it easier for top
executives to connect with workers.

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WARREN BUFFETT
When the Oracle of Omaha bought a piece of
Goldman Sachs last year, not only did he receive
better terms than the government, he got better
returns: As of February, Buffett’s $5 billion
investment had appreciated 12 percent, while the
Treasury’s $10 billion stake had fallen 25 percent.

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KATHARINE GRAHAM
“Kate the Great” deserved her nickname. Under her
leadership, the Washington Post published the
Pentagon Papers and broke the Watergate story.
Between 1981 and 1991, when Graham retired, the
Washington Post Co.’s stock price increased
elevenfold.
THE STAT: Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer,
bought the Washington Post at a public auction in
1933 for $825,000. She began working at the
company in 1938.

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LEE IACOCCA
In case there’s any lingering doubt, current
Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli is no Lee Iacocca. When
Iacocca arrived at Chrysler, during a time of record
losses at the company, he cut inventories by $1
billion, reduced the white-collar staff by 50 percent,
and turned Chrysler around—not with government
loans, but with $1.5 billion in loan guarantees.
Iacocca repaid the loans ahead of time and the
Treasury made a profit of $300 million.
THE STAT: In 1992, the year Iacocca retired, the
company recorded a $700 million profit. Last year,
Chrysler, now privately held, lost $8 billion.

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HRB KELLEHER
In his long tenure as CEO of Southwest Airlines,
Kelleher chain-smoked Kool cigarettes, drank Wild
Turkey, and produced the highest return to
shareholders of any company in the S&P 500. Much
of Kelleher’s success in later years can be attributed
to his aggressive fuel-hedging program, which
served the company well when oil prices were high
but cost the company when they plummeted.
THE STAT: During Kelleher’s reign, the stock went
from 7 cents a share to over $20.

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OPRAH WINFREY
A hug—or a plug—from O on The Oprah Winfrey
Show is pretty much all you need to spur sales of
anything, be it scented candles or obscure novels.
The first female black billionaire in U.S. history,
Winfrey started out as a local talk-show host; today,
she runs an influential, if comparatively small,
media conglomerate that publishes books and
produces television shows, movies, and radio
programs.
THE STAT: Winfrey is now estimated to be worth
almost $3 billion.

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Top 20 Best American CEOs of All Time

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