Every year around this time Sydney Finkelstein, professor of management and an associate dean at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, produces his list of the Worst CEOs of the year. For the first time this year he's also adding a best list.

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On Finkelstein's best CEO list: Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN); Pony Ma of Tencent (TCEHY), John Idol of Michael Kors (KORS), Reed Hastings of Netflix (NFLX) and Akio Toyoda of Toyota (TM). He explains his picks in the video above and highlights below, and we've added some of our own analysis as well.

Bezos, Ma and Hastings have several traits in common: they all founded the companies they still head and their companies are Internet-based.

Jeff Bezos
CEO, Amazon

Bezos is "the magic man, the new Steve Jobs," says Finkelstein, referring to Apple's visionary founder. He says Bezos does whatever it takes to win: "an unbelievable focus on customers...[and] nonstop innovation" which has created a "big cloud business ... [and] the plumbing for ecommerce."

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Those innovations could mean that Amazon "doesn't even have to make money selling books and a million other things," says Finkelstein though he suggests the companies move into fashion--"an industry ripe for disruption" could be big for Amazon. Fashion houses "are all trying to make ecommerce work, and there's no one better at it than Amazon," says Finkelstein. Indeed Amazon acquired Zappos, the online shoe seller, in 2009 and last year opened a large-scale fashion photo studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Since Amazon went public in mid May 1997, its stock price has increased by more than 220-fold.

Reed Hastings
CEO, Netflix

Reed Hastings, was on Finkelstein's worst CEO two years ago following the company's decision to separate its DVD-by-mail business from Internet streaming and raise subscription prices. Subscribers screamed and the stock plummeted, reducing the company's market cap by more than $9 billion.
Then Reed reversed his decision, the stock rebounded--it's up almost 300% in the past year---and Netflix added original programming. It even made history at the 2013 Emmys as the first non-TV network to win an award--for David Fincher, director of its original program "House of Cards."

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"I, like many others probably underestimated him," says Finkelstein, about Hastings. "Reed Hastings is one of those post-modern CEOs that has really figured out how to create an Internet company, how to energize people ... kind of a Jeff Bezos strategy ... nonstop innovation on every type of thing." And, says Finkelstein, Hastings has humility--"one of the best signs you can possibly look for" in a CEO.