Ranked: Philadelphia’s 21 Most Likeable CEOs

Left to Right: Richard J. Bolte; Bill Marvin; Amy Gutmann; Apu Gupta.

Owler, a new business community platform and rising LinkedIn competitor, recently released its inaugural top-rated CEO rankings for 50 cities worldwide, including Philadelphia.

The rankings are based on ratings submitted by the platform’s 1 million users who contributed more than a quarter million CEO ratings.

“The intent of our Owler research is not to define what makes a CEO likeable,” wrote Owler head of marketing Nicole Lopuch in a blog post. “[The ranking allows] the pubic to weigh in on whether a CEO is doing a good job or not. There is full transparency.”

She added: “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?” 

CEO likability has become a crucial issue in this new era of visibility, where CEOs are subject to reviews as if they were a restaurant on Yelp, said Jim Fowler, founder and CEO of Owler, who created the platform after first building Jigsaw, an online business directory that sold to Salesforce for $175 million in 2010.

Overall, Philly’s ranked CEOs had an average score of 70.5/100 and Philly ranked number 10 in the country on Owler’s Top 30 cities list for Most Liked CEOs, suggesting that Philly CEOs are well liked relative to other CEOs around the country.

Here’s Owler’s complete ranking of Philly’s most likeable CEOs:

1. Timothy J. Donahue, Crown Holdings
2. Bill Marvin, InstaMed
3. Richard Jr. Bolte, BDP International
4. Arthur P. Bedrosian, Lannett
5. Amy Gutmann, University of Pennsylvania
6. Kevin O’Nell, PeopleLinx
7. Brendan McCorkle, Cloudmine
8. Charles W. Shaver, Axalta
9. John Elsey, Richardson
10. James Corrigan, ERT
11. Tim Raybould, Ticketleap
12. John A. Fry, Drexel University
13. Eric J. Foss, Aramark
14. Brent Windom, Pep Boys
15. Neil D. Theolbald, Temple University
16. Apu Gupta, Curalate
17. Jeffrey D. Marrazzo, Spark Therapeutics
18. Brian L. Roberts, Comcast
19. Michael Castleman, CDI Corporation
20. Robert J. Moore, Head of Magento Analytics (formerly RJ Metrics CEO)
21. Richard A. Hayne, URBN

To see each CEO’s score, view Owler’s list here.

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