Dhe most influential manager in Germany is an Austrian: Herbert Diess That’s his name, the Chairman of the Board of Management of Volkswagen AG based in Wolfsburg. Diess currently enjoys the best reputation among all the heads of the major German stock corporations, gathered in the leading index Dax 40. That is the result of an investigation by the Cologne consulting firm Unicepta for this newspaper. In second and third place Christian Sewing (Deutsche Bank) and Ola Källenius (Mercedes-Benz).
The media analysis company evaluated more than 11,000 articles in the leading German media and compared the reporting in the first quarter of this year. Twitter posts about the CEOs and their companies were also taken into account. In order to determine the effect of the CEOs from the Dax in the media discussion, a new, reach-based index was developed that is based on three factors: “probability of reception”, which records the reach of the reporting; “Focus,” which measures the importance of leaders within individual posts; and “Tonality”, which evaluates whether the respective posts are negative, neutral or positive reporting.
Diess, who is considered one of the most prominent bosses in the Dax, was quoted in the first three months of the year above all with his assessment of the economic consequences of the Ukraine war – not only in the German-speaking media: also the New York Timesthat Wall Street Journal or the Sun took up his classifications. The fact that Volkswagen shares have lost almost 15 percent since the beginning of the year probably did not damage the CEO’s image.
The best performance, measured by the share price, has been delivered by the Bayer boss so far this year Werner Baumann away. With a gain of 44 percent, Bayer shares left the competition in the Dax far behind. Overall, things have been rather turbulent for the 40 companies in the index since the beginning of the year: Only seven were able to show any price gains at all.