HEY LEO, NICE GUYS CAN FINISH FIRST!

1. HEY LEO, NICE GUYS CAN FINISH FIRST!

This item from the San Francisco Business Times caught my eye, and brought to mind the pugnacious baseball manager Leo “The Lip” Durocher, who famously said “Nice guys finish last:

“The Bay Area’s Most Underrated CEOs” 10/16/23

Do nice CEOs finish last? Not in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where some leaders have managed to keep the loyalty of their troops and woo Wall Street at the same time.

We asked Glassdoor, the workplace-review site, for a list of Bay Area CEOs with minimum approval ratings of 90%, based on a broad set of reviews. We then ranked those CEOs by their year-to-date stock returns. The results were illuminating.

Topping the list is Nvidia Corp., which became a trillion-dollar company this spring. Jensen Huang, the company's founder and CEO, has a 99% approval rating and a stock that has soared 224% since Jan. 1. The AI boom has been good for the Santa Clara company, which has emerged as a key supplier for the endless racks of servers needed to run the large language models that power services like ChatGPT.

Another hot tech field, cybersecurity, fueled Palo Alto Networks Inc.'s rise — as, it seems, did Nikesh Arora's 2018 hire as CEO. Since the former Google LLC and SoftBank Group Corp. executive arrived at the company — which is based in Santa Clara, despite the name — the stock has nearly quadrupled. Outsiders aren't always welcomed in tight-knit technical cultures, but the company seems to have warmed up to Arora. It helps that the stock is up 87% this year.

Burton Goldfield is only TriNet USA Inc.'s second CEO. Since his 2008 hire, he's taken the benefits outsourcer public and lately presided over an impressive stock run-up at the Dublin firm.

In fourth place is Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Lisa Su. Stifel analyst Ruben Roy has called its chips the "only viable alternative" to Nvidia, which may help explain the Santa Clara company's stock run-up. Her popularity with employees may come down to her distinctive leadership style, which is heavy on mentorship and "setting ambitious goals,"she told Investor's Business Daily.

What do these leaders have in common? A "healthy corporate culture" can't be reduced to a single measure like the stock price, Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at Glassdoor, told me. But financial performance does matter, and there can be "feedback loops" where a strong stock boosts morale, which in turn boosts employees' performance and confidence in management.

Speaking of incoherent corporations, by far the worst performer in employee approval and financial metrics is X Corp. CEO Linda Yaccarino, who has a 15% approval rating among employees of the San Francisco company formerly known as Twitter Inc. X isn't publicly traded after Elon Musk paid $44 billion to buy it, but the company reportedly may now be worth less than the $13 billion he borrowed to finance the deal. If X had a ticker, it would be flatlining, in other words.

2. The Number 1 Rule For Being a Great Communicator

I am reading a wonderful book, Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World, by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink.

Their “Principle #1” for communicating more effectively?

Less is more.

3. And Finally...

Keep the faith, and love your neighbor.