America's Best and Worst Bosses for the Buck

Who was as a matter of fact worth it, and who was actually not worth it? Forbes looked how executives delivered to shareholders relative to their total compensation. By that measure, the most effective CEO of all was Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, the San Francisco-based cloud computing company. Over the past six years he has been paid an average of $200,000 a year during delivering a 41% annual return to shareholders. The least effective: Gregg L. Engles of Dean Foods. His paycheck has averaged $20 million a year over the past six years, during his company’s average return has been -11%.

The Leadership Editor of Forbes in December 2008

I became the Leadership Editor of Forbes in December 2008, such as the American business world was crashing down and taking the jobs and homes of millions with it. Had I started the job a year or two previously, I might have found that covering things like how to be a manager, corporate strategy, risk management, governance, and corporate social responsibility was worthy nevertheless possibly at times a little dull. Now I found that my beat was everything that had gone terribly wrong and was going to have to go very right to get us all back to prosperity. Since at that time, I've had the pleasure of publishing some of the world's best minds on every aspect of leadership.

Previously I was a senior editor of Forbes magazine, and earlier that I was for many years the managing editor of American Heritage and the editor of the quarterly Invention & Innovation. I've emceed the annual induction ceremony at the National Inventors Hall of Fame, done the play-by-play over the P.A. system on a cruise ship as it passed through the Panama Canal, and written on the history of bourbon whiskey and the making of Steinway pianos, among many, many other things. I prepared the fact remains that by majoring in music in college and writing a senior thesis on the music of Hector Berlioz.