The FT's new CEO Performance Ranking attempts to bridge the gap between different perspectives on what makes a great chief executive. Combining market performance, corporate execution and leadership metrics across nine measures, it ranks the bosses of Britain's largest listed companies. Under default weightings, Tufan Erginbilgiç, chief executive of Rolls-Royce, comes out on top, though users can adjust weightings to reflect their own views on leadership, shareholder returns, or other factors.

Across the group, chief executives have outperformed the market by about five percentage points a year during their tenures. More recent performance has been diverse, with companies in AI, power infrastructure and commodities generating strong returns, while others have lagged despite solid operations.

The highest-ranked leaders tend to be younger, around 56 years old, with neutral news sentiment. Notably, top scorers had weaker employee satisfaction ratings. Veteran CEOs like Simon Wolfson of Next and Mike Norris of Computacenter have each spent over two decades in charge, with Wolfson generating returns nine percentage points above the market—though constrained by weaker scale and valuation measures.