Introduction
Meet Canada's best managers and top performing companies. These executives have stickhandled their way through serious business challenges and come out winners.
The panel
Debi Andrus,
Haskayne School of Business
Craigg Ballance,
The CIO Summit / E-finity Group
Doug Cooper,
Intel Canada
Michael Denham,
Accenture Canada
Stephen Ibaraki,
CIPS National
Mary Lou Maher,
KPMG Canada
Tom McDowell,
Oliver Wyman–Delta Organization & Leadership
Al Rosen and Mark Rosen,
Rosen & Associates
Michael Stern,
Michael Stern Associates
The methodology
Our 7th annual look at Canada’s best managers began with Bain & Co.’s Profit from the Core approach to setting financial performance benchmarks. We screened the 258 companies on the S&P/TSX Composite Index (as of Dec. 31, 2007) for profitable growth. Companies had to pass a series of 3-calendar-year hurdles: the compounded annual growth rate of net sales and net income had to exceed GDP growth, and the annualized total shareholder return (including dividends and distributions) had to exceed the company’s cost of equity.
To further reduce the pool of companies in contention, each company that passed those initial hurdles had to also perform better than their industry mean in at least one of the 3-calendar-year screens.
Also, companies had to match or exceed the average 3-year Return On Equity of their respective industries on a North American-wide basis, as defined by Bloomberg's Relative Value measure.
The result was a group of just 69 companies, listed below. We researched the recent histories and senior executives of the qualifying companies, with a focus on businesses that outperformed peers. Our panel of experts, as well as our own staff, provided comments on the executives, and the companies were also given the opportunity to nominate senior leaders of their choosing.
In the end, Canadian Business selected the best managers in 5 categories: Chief Executive, Finance, Operations, Sales & Marketing and Most Innovative Executive.An open-nomination process also invited submissions for Most Innovative Executive.
