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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.

Chief Executive Officer, CEO. It's a term that carries a lot of weight in our minds because in the complex and ever-changing world of business

There does have to be someone a real human at the top in charge, but still accountable

No one of course is ever completely in control in charge, but still accountable.

No one, of course, is ever completely in control,

or even close to it, but there's probably no other single person

with as much power over their company's success or failure.

That's why, when Harvard Business Review publishes its annual

list of the 100 best performing CEOs it says as much about the people on the list

as it does about how we define success for this office of the Chief Executive.

HBR's new ranking is out now.

You can read it in the November issue of the magazine and at HBR.org.

Here to talk about it with us today is Dan McGinn, senior editor at Harvard Business Review.

Dan, thank you so much for coming in to talk with us today.

It's great to be here.

So to get started, if you went out on the street and asked people, you know, who the best performing CEOs are,

they might think of Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook or Tim Cook of Apple, you know, some of these really well-known famous CEOs with a lot of name recognition.

But HPR's list is clearly different. The top spot goes to Lars Sorensen,

...