Social media can now allow us to measure that kind of thought leadership in a more quantitative way, whether the candidate is going to be in marketing or engineering or in one of the C-Level offices.
But he warned that the government's introduction of a new league table measure - the English Baccalaureate - risked creating the kind of distortion that was being criticised in the current rankings.
On the face of it this seems ridiculous: the idea that California could be the poorest State in the US. However, rankings of this kind really do depend on what it is that you measure.