Cisco's Chambers takes podium place in top-100 CEOs list

John Chambers joined by Salesforce and Amazon leaders on global leader board

Cisco's chief executive John Chambers has finished third in the Harvard Business Review's (HBR) list of the 100 best-performing CEOs in the world for 2014.

HBR claims its top-100 rankings analyse the performance of chief executives objectively by assessing which "global CEOs actually delivered solid results over the long run".

Chambers (pictured) took on the chief executive role at Cisco in 1995, and since then he has managed to steer the firm from $70m (£43.66m) in annual revenues to its last fiscal year's figure of $47.1bn.

In 2012 Chambers announced he intended to retire in two to four years, but the Ohio-born executive remains at the helm of Cisco.

According to Bloomberg, Chambers received $16.5m in compensation for the company's latest fiscal year, a 22 per cent decline from the previous year.

Topping HBR's list was Jeffrey Bezos at Amazon, who took over the global online retailer in 1996.

Also making waves from the IT world in the list was Marc Benioff, the boss and founder of Salesforce.com, who finished 15th.