Download the results MircroSoft Excel Spreadsheet format. Investors have been wrestling with that question for decades. Some, including Warren Buffett, have taken the position that industry is almost everything, and that even the most brilliant manager is doomed in a doggy business. Yet securities analysts spend much of their time assessing the abilities of a company's executive team, particularly the person at the very top. In fact, Chief Executive's third annual ranking of CEOs shows that the way to get really rich is to be right about both the industry and the individual.
Industry reigns at the very top.
The upper echelon is populated almost exclusively by CEOs whose companies are reinventing the economy and creating a rapidly growing share of GDP in the process. Of the top 25 CEOs, nearly all run computer, communications, or Internet-related companies. No. 1 for the second year running is Bernard J. Ebbers of WorldCom, followed by Steve Case of AOL, who edged Bill Gates from second to third place. Of 70 computer company CEOs in the ranking, half are in the top 100 and 11 are among the top 25. In contrast, CEOs in the automotive, forest products, and chemical industries rarely make it past the middling range of the ranking.