The best in business cut out the bluff and bluster

If you're like most consumers of business and financial news, you gobble up those useless lists of ‘Best Leaders' and ‘Most Admired Companies', trusting that people in my line of work have the right formula to measure what's ‘best'.

Over the years, I've been in the room when some business ‘best' lists were put together, and the creators of David Letterman's Top Ten look like a Nobel Prize jury by comparison.

I got to wondering why so many of us do such a bad job of evaluating the quality of our leaders after Warren Buffett and Howard Schultz made news last month for doing what chief executive officers rarely do. They used their bully pulpits to take stands that weren't, on their face, self-serving, and that had the potential to benefit people outside the privileged class. Who knew that business leaders could step up to lead?

Buffett, head of Berkshire Hathaway, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on August 14 saying that mega-rich Americans like him ought to pay more taxes. The story went viral.

Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, went public on August 12 with a proposal that business cease making political contributions until Congress and the president come up with a "fiscally disciplined long-term debt and deficit plan". Ditto the viral story thing.

You can love or hate their proposals, but you've got to admit that Schultz and Buffett are a breed apart from their CEO brethren. Somehow, though, we keep putting the wrong executives on a pedestal. Why do we fawn over glitz and future felons instead of seeking out real leaders?

The checklist

For one thing, we love those dopey lists, which sometimes aggrandise people or companies that may have satisfied a publication's set of metrics, but may not be worthy of our adulation. To help discriminating readers get smarter about who deserves, and doesn't deserve, our admiration, I've compiled a list, including tips on how to see through flawed news coverage of CEOs and companies. Would somebody out there please consider tracking some of these?

If you really want to learn something about business executives, watch how they use the platform that comes with the job. Are you seeing their bylines on op-eds that whine about over-regulation, or are they, like Buffett, putting themselves on the line writing controversial articles that recommend policies that might benefit the public at large, even at their own personal expense?

CEOs make lots of proclamations, but not all of them ring true. A favourite of mine was in a New York Times magazine story in December 2010 titled ‘America's least-hated banker', an uncomplimentary compliment of a headline if ever there was one.

As Sherlock Holmes discovered, there's a lot to be learned from the dog that doesn't bark. I called media relations at the US Chamber of Commerce, a business lobbying group that isn't exactly shy about voicing its opinion, and asked what it had to say about the recent proposals by Buffett and Schultz. "At this point, we are not weighing in on either one of those," said spokesman Bryan Goettel. Is that what you should expect from a group whose membership is chock-full of well-known business leaders and has lots to say about things like taxes?

If you want to be a very cool journalist, you come out fastest with an argument about corporate and political big shots that runs counter to the prevailing news. Buffett is getting praise for calling the fat cats to task? Then get out a story telling him to go write a cheque if he wants to pay more taxes. This instant contrarianism is usually filler on slow days when the writer had nothing else to go with.

This is a very long list, and to get on it, you have to produce a feature story replete with breathless and hyperbolic language describing the people or companies who have made the cut as ‘best'.

This is as short as the previous list is long. Paul Janensch, professor emeritus of journalism at Quinnipiac University, says that Buffett's call for higher taxes on the wealthy was a big splash because it was a man-bites-dog story. But "don't hold your breath waiting for CEOs of utilities and manufacturing companies to lobby for tighter environmental restrictions or hedge fund titans to demand tougher regulation of the markets", he says.

Wall Street is a place where a lot of people make a lot of money because they know how to measure things. So how come we get lists that measure financial advisers based on the revenue they make but not based on the money their customers make? On second thought, I take it back. You will never see a list like this.

Lists are catnip for readers with short attention spans, an advertising bonanza for publishers (last year's winners are natural targets for sales calls to run ads in next year's feature) and a boon to any public-relations staff navigating a crisis.

Now we're getting serious. Nancy F. Koehn, a business historian at Harvard Business School, says list-mania doesn't always produce losers; it's just that you have to look past the executives riding a momentary wave to find the gems. "On all those lists there are always serious hitters," she says, citing A. G. Lafley, who retired as CEO of Procter and Gamble in 2010, as a "very, very serious leader" who is "completely unsexy," but still makes all the lists. Happily, Koehn is predicting that Buffett and Schultz will inspire other executives to speak up about what's wrong with government, calling the two CEOs "canaries down what will become a much more crowded mine shaft".

If you insist on paying attention to round-ups of the best and greatest, read them for their entertainment value. To really understand who the great leaders and companies are takes more than fancy metrics and a show of hands at an editorial meeting.

— Bloomberg

Susan Antilla, who has written about Wall Street and business for three decades and is the author of Tales From the Boom-Boom Room, is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.