By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
Samsung Electronics Standing Advisor Yun Jong-yong was ranked second among the world's best performing chief executive officers (CEOs) by the Harvard Business Review (HBR), company officials said.
Yun, former vice chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics, trailed only Apple's Steve Jobs on the list dominated by leaders of information technology (IT) companies.
Alexey Miller, chairman of the management committee of Gazprom, the Russian energy company that is the world's largest natural gas producer, came in third.
John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, and Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of India's Reliance Industries, rounded out the top five.
Jeff Bezos, founder, chairman and CEO of Amazon, finished seventh, while former eBay president and CEO Meg Whitman was eighth, followed by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt at ninth.
Chung Mong-koo, chairman of Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group, the world's fourth-largest carmaker, finished 29th and was the only other Korean to finish in HBR's top 50.
The list, to be published in January, includes information on nearly 2,000 CEOs worldwide as compiled by Morten Hansen and Herminia Ibarra, both professors at INSEAD. The CEOs that were researched represent 48 nationalities and companies based in 33 countries.
``We measured performance based on hard metrics - the objective, cold reality of shareholder returns and changes in market value,'' the authors said.
Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison were among the prominent business figures not to be mentioned on the list, as HBR only considered CEOs who had assumed their jobs no earlier than January 1995 and no later than December 2007.
Yun worked as Samsung Electronics' top-decision maker from 1996 to 2008, and contributed to the company, becoming one of the most influential companies in technology during that span.
Samsung Electronics is now the world's largest electronics maker, the leading manufacturer of flat-screen televisions and the No. 2 player in mobile phones, and also the biggest provider of memory chips.
Yun, who stepped down as CEO last year, had been named as ``Asia's Businessman of the Year'' by Fortune magazine in 2000, received the ``Asia Business Leaders Award'' from CNBC in 2002, and was named among the ``Top 25 Managers of the Year'' by Business Week in 2003.