We’re excited to announce the results of our inaugural 2017 Owler Top Rated CEO Awards, which

highlight the highest-rated leaders across 50 cities and 25 industries. All in all, the Owler Community contributed more than a quarter of a million CEO ratings this year alone.

In addition to ranking the CEOs overall, we dug a little deeper to provide the Owler Community with additional insights about the most-loved CEOs to find out who's the best-liked US public company CEO

and what CEO has the most work to do in the eyes of the public. Read on for our complete findings.

The 50 Most Liked Public Company CEOs in America

Our 2017 CEO Likeability Survey looked at which CEOs in the country have the highest approval rating based on a favorability algorithm. While there are many small companies with beloved CEOs, we started

our analysis with a look at how CEOs at the nation’s top public companies compare.

Hyatt CEO Mark Hoplamazian may not be pleased to hear people like Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson more than him. And Silicon Valley might not be too happy to see none of their public tech darlings like Facebook or Google cracked the top 10. But the data doesn’t lie.

Here’s the complete list of Top 50 CEOs for U.S. public companies.

Which Cities Have the Most Liked CEOs?

After feeding our massive dataset of CEO approval ratings into our algorithm, we discovered a selection of U.S. cities that are home to CEOs everybody loves.

It turns out if you want to have the best chance of working for a beloved CEO, you’d do well to live in Nashville. Of the 30 most business-dense cities in our dataset, here’s how they rank against each other — from best to worst — for CEO likeability.

Does the CEO’s Industry Make a Difference?You might think good and bad CEOs are evenly distributed across all industries. But our data says

otherwise. When we look at average CEO ratings by industry, we find the top bosses in the Marketing and Creative, Travel and Hospitality, and Automotive industries tend to get more love than any other industry. Last on the list — and this won’t surprise most folks — the lowest ranking CEOs work in the Airline industry

Here’s the full list from best to worst:

CEO Likeability by Ownership TypeAs part of our CEO Likeability Survey, we wanted to understand whether public company CEOs were

liked better or worse than private company CEOs.

With more pressure to hit earnings numbers, our hypothesis was that public company CEOs might be a little crankier and have less time to build goodwill with employees and other stakeholders.

Sure enough, the numbers suggest the average private company CEO is more likeable than your average public company CEO.

Based on our dataset of public and private company CEOs, the average private company CEO rating of 70.8 beat out the average public company CEO rating, which clocked in at 68.0.

That’s actually a respectable showing for public company CEOs. In general, smaller companies — which are usually not public — tend to have higher CEO ratings because the CEO is more likely to know employees, vendors and others on a personal basis. It’s possible that public company CEOs are making up for this by having marketing and public relations programs that are specifically

designed to cultivate a positive public image.

Most Disliked CEOsFor CEOs with low likeability ratings, proactive damage control may be in order. When we look at

CEOs of large public companies that are at the bottom of the list, with the lowest algorithm-based ratings, there are some big names:

No More Mr. Bad GuyThe intent of our Owler research is not to define what makes a CEO likeable. There are plenty of academic researchers and executive search firms that can weigh in on that topic. But a CEO who isn’t liked should certainly ask the question: “Is there something about the way I am conducting myself as CEO of this company that is needlessly making people not like me? What needs to change

to turn that around?”

The phenomenon behind Owler’s CEO ranking data is likely putting increased pressure on CEOs to be nicer. In the old days, a CEO could be abusive to individuals and not be held accountable. After all, who would find out? Probably nobody.

These days, sites like Owler allow the public to weigh in on whether a CEO is doing a good job or not. There is full transparency. It’s no different from a restaurant that serves bad food hoping it can stay in business because new customers will keep coming in the door. In the era of Yelp reviews, that’s no longer possible.

The Bottom LineWhile the news is full of stories about egregiously high CEO compensation and other stories that might portray CEOs in a bad light, it’s important to remember CEOs are human too. They are either loved, hated or somewhere in between. In some small way, how much we all like the people who lead us tells as much about us as it does about our leaders. Why would we tolerate leaders we don’t like? What does it mean if we reward unlikeable people with our highest paying and most

prestigious positions? How is it that some CEOs manage to do a lot of heavy lifting, with tons of pressure on them, and stay in our good graces?

What’s your take on CEOs and how likeable they are? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Owler is the world’s largest community-based business insights platform that business professionals use to outsmart their competition, gain competitive

insights, and uncover the latest industry news and alerts. Owler is powered by an active community of 1 million business professionals who contribute

unique business insights such as competitors, private company revenue, and CEO ratings. From startups all the way to large enterprises (including 96%

of the Fortune 500), CEOs, salespeople, marketers, product managers, and all types of business professionals use Owler daily. Launched in 2014, and

funded by Norwest Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures, Owler is headquartered in San Mateo, CA with offices in Spokane, WA, and Coimbatore, India. ,

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www: owler.com

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Annie Gudorf Walker Sands 312-648-6008 annie.gudorf@walkersands.com