All-star execs

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

Mark Aboud, SAP Canada
Debi Andrus, Haskayne School of Business
Craigg Ballance, The CIO Summit / E-finity Group
Michael Denham, Accenture Canada
Stephen Ibaraki, CIPS National
Mary Lou Maher, KPMG Canada
Tom McDowell, Oliver Wyman­Delta Organization & Leadership
Al Rosen and Mark Rosen, Rosen & Associates
Carol Stephenson, Richard Ivey School of Business
Michael Stern, Michael Stern Associates

The methodology

Our 8th 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 217 companies on the S&P/TSX Composite Index (as of Dec. 31, 2008) 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.

The result was a group of just 25 companies, listed below. We researched the recent histories and senior executives of the qualifying companies, with a focus on businesses that outperformed peers.

One change this year: given the depressed state of the equity markets at the close of 2008 and the subsequent rebound, we also took into consideration the year-to-date stock performance through the end of June 2009 of the 78 companies that had otherwise passed the 3-year net sales and net income screens. Twenty-six companies had positive returns.

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 magazine awarded 4 honours: Top CEO, Top CFO, Top COO, Top Retail Executive. A fifth award, Most Innovative Executive Team, was also open to nominations of privately controlled businesses.