Cover story - Boardroom heroes.

(From Financial Director)

It's the career ambition of many finance directors to become a chief executive, whether at their own company or elsewhere. But how well do FDs perform when they get the top job? Using job data from Boardex and financial statistics from Thomson Financial's Datastream, we've analysed the total shareholder returns generated by almost 60 FDs-turned-CEOs in the FTSE-350. We found that 34 of them generated market-beating TSR, compared with just 24 who lagged the market. And half a dozen of the underperformers were beaten by less than 4%. Our table on pages 44-45 provides the full results, ranking CEOs by their relative TSR. Here we highlight 10 of the best-performing CEOs - and the five who have performed the worst.

Paul Walker - Sage Group

CEO since January 1994

FD Sage Group (1987-94)

You have to study carefully the scale on this chart to fully appreciate the performance that has been achieved at Sage since Paul Walker was promoted from FD to CEO almost 10 years ago. The value created in terms of the share price and dividends dwarfs everything else in our list - and would have been astronomical at the top of the dotcom boom. But total shareholder returns have been around -80% since the market peaked.

William Colvin - NHP