Metrics Matter: How You Select Determines Outcome – Forbes Should Listen to Its Own Reporters

UPWORTHY: Forbes’ 100 Most Innovative Leaders list includes 99 men. Here’s how their methodology was flawed

By Annie Reneau

12 September 2019

The fine folks at Forbes are currently falling all over themselves trying to clean up the mess they created by publishing their 2019 list of 100 Most Innovative Leaders.

The problem: The list included 99 men and one woman. For those not so good with the math, that means according to Forbes, only 1% of the country’s most innovative leaders are female.

Have you ever watched a movie that’s so abysmally bad that you wonder how it ever even got made? Where you think, “Hundreds and hundreds of people had to have been directly involved in the production of this film. Did any of them ever think to say, ‘Hey, maybe we should just scrap this idea altogether?”

That’s how it feels to see a list like this. So how did Forbes come up with these results?

Let’s start with the description at the top of the published list, synopsizing who compiled the list and how:

“Business school professors Jeff Dyer, Nathan Furr and Mike Hendron teamed up with consultant Curtis Lefrandt to measure four essential leadership qualities of top founders and CEOs: media reputation for innovation, social connections, track record for value creation and investor expectations for value creation. The researchers then ranked these visionaries in a high-powered selection of 100 innovators at top U.S. companies.”

Read the full article on Upworthy.