EY's Mark Weinberger most popular CEO of Big Four firms
Owler has unveiled the winners and losers of its international popularity contest, releasing a list of the most liked CEOs in the management consulting industry. The rankings are based on a narrow dataset of firms and CEOs, so does not provide a complete view of the consulting industry elite, however, it does provide interesting insights among those that have made the ranking. EY’s Mark Weinberger for instance outranks Deloitte’s Punit Renjen, and KPMG’s Lynne Doughtie, while BCG’s Rich Lesser can call himself the most beloved CEO of the MBB strategy consulting firms.
Founded in 2011, Owler is a competitive intelligence platform that hosts one of the world's largest databases of company and executive information. The company’s analysts utilised this resource-pool in order to crowdsource data for the poll in question. To calculate the approval ratings of the top bosses, rather than using a one person one vote system, Owler evaluated criteria for every person who rated the CEO. Inputs from employees, followers, competitors and other stakeholders were weighted differently in the model, with an algorithm ensuring that multiple inputs could not be submitted by the same individual.
The numbers subsequently gleaned from the firm’s database, which includes over 167,000 executives world-wide, showed large variations in how the perception of CEOs differs across sectors – however, with an average score of 70 on a scale of 100, CEOs in consulting ranked #15 in the firm’s top 25 industries list, suggesting that compared to other industries, CEOs leading at consulting companies are in the middle of the road when it comes to favourability. Top rated CEOs meanwhile generally worked in the Marketing & Creative, Automobile and Insurance sectors.
Top of the Pops
Within consulting, Mark Weinberger, EY’s global CEO since 2013, has been named the most likeable CEO in the professional services industry according to the results, followed by Punit Renjen, who took the helm at Deloitte in 2015. They both outrank Lynne Doughtie of KPMG, and significantly higher than PwC chairman Dennis M. Nally, who does not even rank on the list, leaving the Big Four incomplete. Owler’s analysts have not revealed as to why PwC’s equivalent CEO hasn’t been included – this could be due to confusion surrounding his alternative title, or because he received too few reviews from the active user base of the community, which is over a million strong.
The table of most likeable CEOs further revealed that Rich Lesser of BCG, scored slightly higher than Bain’s Bob Bechek, while both polled firmly ahead of Dominic Barton of McKinsey & Company, the largest of the three strategy consulting firms.
Other CEOs highlighted in the ranking were Accenture’s Pierre Nanterme, Horacio D. Rozanski of Booz Allen Hamilton and Gregory C. Case from Aon. Julio A. Portalatin, the global boss of Mercer, outranks one of his main rivals, Gary D. Burnison of Korn Ferry, who also has end responsibility for the firm’s Hay Group division.
