Fortune's Top Lists

Fortune’s List Rankings -

An Analysis

What Are the Lists?

Fortune magazine publishes various ranked lists annually that pit companies against each other based on certain valued criteria. One of these lists is “World’s Most Admired Companies,” where publically traded companies at the top of their respective industries are ranked to show their comparison to others on a global scale. Fortune uses what they call “key attributes of excellence” to build the list, and we will conduct an analysis of these attributes to learn more than what the simple ranking can portray. Another list by the same magazine called, “The 100 Best Companies to Work For,” takes a look from a different perspective at companies that excel in employee satisfaction. By comparing these two lists we can discover the links between them and the reasoning behind why companies are not on both.

World’s Most Admired Companies

First we will look at what top ten companies made the list published in 2006:

1. General Electric | 6. Microsoft |

2. Toyota Motor | 7. Dell |

3. Procter & Gamble | 8. Berkshire Hathaway |

4. FedEx | 9. Apple |

5. Johnson & Johnson | 10. Wal-Mart Stores |

To compile the list, Fortune started with a much longer list that included all companies from any industry whose total revenue exceeded $8 billion. From there, over 8000 executives and directors from those companies, including analysts, were surveyed. The survey they received asked them to rate the companies in their respective industry on a scale from zero to ten based on nine “key attributes of excellence.” They were also given the task of listing their top ten companies across all industries. The results of the survey created the overall official list of the “World’s Most Admired Companies.”

To do a comparison, we will now look at the list published in 2013:

1. Apple | 6. IBM |

2. Google | 7. Southwest |

3. Amazon.com | 8. Berkshire Hathaway |

4. Coca-Cola | 9. Walt Disney |

5. Starbucks...