【Business】2017年全球最伟大领袖榜中的商界领导者

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为什么带有污点的名字总是容易被记住？就像遭解雇的美国国家安全顾问Michael Flynn、被捕入狱的三星掌门李在镕、两月任期内创下历史最低支持率的总统特朗普......有什么是好消息呢？

我们一直在广撒网，在全球范围内寻找着那些最杰出的领导者代表。于是，我们找到了他们和她们——在全球的各个地方，这些男人和女人们正用你未曾想象的方式改变世界，并且，还激励着其他人来做同样的事情。

我们评估了他们各自在属于自己的领域中的不菲功绩，这份榜单上的所有人选都懂得，并擅长在当今环境中卓越施展自己的领导力。

这份榜单的关键并不在于位列高低，它所想要表达的是：真正伟大的领导者，可以在任何一个大企业掌舵，也可以在任何一间狭小的办公室搏力。不论身处何地，他们总能通过纯粹的个人能量施展影响。

虽然加速变化的趋势表明，企业寿命正在下降、高管任期正在缩短，但可贺的是，这些杰出的人们并未消失。他们会振奋你的精神，提升你对世界格局的认知。

以下是本年度“全球最伟大50位领袖”榜单中，最值得关注的商界领导者：

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1. Jack Ma

Executive Chairman, Alibaba Group

Founder and Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group Jack Ma attends the opening ceremony of the third annual World Internet Conference in Wuzhen town of Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, China.

Alibaba, a sprawling and murkily understood digital conglomerate built around e-commerce, has made Jack Ma one of the richest men in China, with a fortune valued at nearly $30 billion. And that success has rocketed him to prominence as arguably the first Chinese executive who’s an easily recognizable figure on the global stage.

What’s more, Ma is using his new platform in unexpected, invigorating ways, positioning himself as a champion of both free trade and philanthropy—and arguing that open digital marketplaces like Alibaba’s can power the world’s economy by enabling small businesses to reach an ever-expanding pool of customers. That’s the premise that emboldened Ma to promise then-President-elect Donald Trump during a sit-down in January that Alibaba would help create 1 million jobs in the U.S. over five years.

To realize his vision, Ma has urged the lowering of trade barriers while proving to be a surprisingly warm, optimistic, and effective diplomat on behalf of capitalism—one known to disarm visitors by greeting them wearing sandals and Buddhist prayer beads.

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2. Melinda Gates

Cochair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

In February, Melinda Gates reiterated her foundation’s pledge to make birth control available to 120 million women globally by 2020, doing so in a passionate personal essay that reminded readers of the link between reproductive rights and economic growth. Her words sparked conversation among allies and foes alike; the fact that they carried so far shows the respect Gates has earned as the public face of the foundation she and her husband, Bill Gates, started. That clout is the fruit of real results: The nearly $37 billion worth of grants the foundation had paid out through 2015 has had an enormous impact in empowering women and reducing infectious disease in the developing world.

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3. Jeff Bezos

Founder and CEO, Amazon

It’s no exaggeration to say that Bezos has revolutionized not one but two industries. Amazon.com, which accounted for 43% of online sales in the U.S. last year, put the fear of God into retailers, pushing them to sell more cheaply and deliver more quickly. And Amazon Web Services, his cloud-computing arm, has upended the economics of information tech¬nology. Entertainment could be the next industry to be Bezos’d: This year Amazon Studios scored three Academy Awards, showing its growing muscle in content delivery.

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4. Brian Chesky

CEO and Head of Community, Airbnb

Nine years ago, Chesky and fellow cofounders Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk were hustling to get a business off the ground that most investors scoffed at. Today the disruptive “home-sharing” platform claims some 160 million “guest arrivals”—2 million people slept in Airbnb accommodations this past New Year’s Eve alone—and a private-market valuation of $31 billion.

As CEO, Chesky—the only one of the three founders with no prior business experience—has scaled with the company and then some, steering Airbnb through regulatory opposition, headline-¬generating safety incidents and an existential crisis around discriminatory behavior on its platform. He has led the business to new heights too, overseeing an ambitious expansion into “experiences,” events, and other services (coming soon, we’re told: flights) and leading Airbnb to something few unicorns can claim: profitability.

Last month Chesky ¬added head of community to his title, a shift to cozy up to the people who control and deliver the product he sells: Airbnb’s hosts. The touchy-feely tactics set up a stark contrast to Airbnb’s sharing-economy alter-ego, Uber, under attack for an allegedly aggressive and sexist culture and for a leaked video showing CEO Travis Kalanick berating an Uber driver. Kalanick has said he needs leadership help. He might take a page from his fellow disrupter’s playbook.

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5. Paul Polman

CEO, Unilever

Unilever doesn’t have a corporate social responsibility department—that place where most companies relegate their do-gooding activities. Instead the consumer goods giant has integrated solving social issues, from food waste to climate change to poverty, into every part of its business. The strategy is the brainchild of Polman, Unilever’s CEO since 2009, who had a vision of doubling its revenue and cutting its environmental footprint in half. Now Unilever has everything from a global handwashing campaign to an ambitious plan to improve the nutritional profile of its products.

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6. Zhang Ruimin

CEO, Haier Group

Many CEOs call their employees associates; others call them partners. Zhang calls all 73,000 of them ¬entrepreneurs—and actually means it. It’s one sign of how Zhang is changing his company, the world’s No. 1 appliance maker, and in the process reconceiving the large business organization more profoundly than anyone else on the planet.

He’s winning in part by expanding through acquisition; in 2016 he bought General Electric’s appliance business for $5.4 billion. More fundamentally, Zhang sees a future that most CEOs don’t. “Competitions in the Internet era are not between companies but between platforms,” he tells Fortune. At Haier, teams of people who may not be Haier employees come together for projects and then disperse. A product can also be a platform for multiple companies. One example: For a networked “smart” oven project, companies that might sell food via the device could pay to be partners, enabling Haier to reduce appliance prices.

Haier consists of some 3,000 company-funded entrepreneurial micro-enterprises that live or die by their individual success, plus a few hundred teams funded partly by outside investment. “If a startup team cannot attract any venture capital, they can either consider how to progress and strive harder or they will be dismissed,” Zhang explains.

So how do you turn thousands of corporate employees into entrepreneurs? Wrong question. “The task is not to turn Haier’s internal staff into entrepreneurs, but rather to attract all the entrepreneurs in society onto our platform,” Zhang says.

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7. Arundhati Bhattacharya

Chairman, State Bank of India

Bhattacharya, the first-ever woman to helm India’s largest bank, has expertly steered SBI—No. 232 on the Global 500—through rough waters (an ongoing battle with bad loans) and sudden storms (India’s surprise demonetization scheme). She’s been transformative, too—dragging the sprawling, 211-year old institution into the digital era and overhauling HR for her 200,000+ employees. The complex, six-bank merger she orchestrated last year will catapult SBI into the ranks of the world’s 50 largest banks. That effectiveness, and her frank, outspoken style has been noticed: Bhattacharya, who was recently granted a rare extension to her three-year term at SBI, was, last year, considered a favorite to lead the Reserve Bank of India, and nominated for the No. 2 job at the World Bank.

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8. Raj Panjabi

CEO, Last Mile Health

Tackling the “last mile”—the final, critical step of delivering products or services to consumers—is a conundrum for businesses, and in health care, last-mile problems hit poor regions especially hard. Panjabi’s nonprofit, Last Mile Health, is striving to change that by training locals in developing countries in lifesaving ¬measures, such as protecting themselves against pandemics and safely burying victims killed by infectious diseases. Last Mile has already proved its mettle; its work in Liberia helped stanch the spread of Ebola during the 2014 outbreak.

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9. Elon Musk

CEO, Tesla and SpaceX

Visionary, ideologue, risk-taker: None of these shorthand labels quite capture who Elon Musk is. The billionaire entrepreneur is running two companies he cofounded that together employ 35,000 people. His aims are stratospheric. Tesla, the automaker and sustainable-energy company that acquired SolarCity in 2016, is Musk’s pathway to a carbon--emissions-free world. (The batteries he’s beginning to crank out at Tesla’s “Gigafactory” in Nevada are another element of that strategy.) SpaceX, an aerospace startup, was founded to lower the cost of space transportation and ultimately enable the colonization of Mars.

Musk, who has admitted to keeping a sleeping bag near a production line at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif., has added another problem to his to-do list—soul-crushing traffic. His new business, the Boring Co., aims to find a way to quickly and cost-effectively dig networks of tunnels for vehicles and high-speed trains such as the Hyperloop, an idea he floated in 2013 that universities and startups are actively trying to develop.

Musk’s aura as a technocratic seer has taken some lumps over the past couple of years. Tesla—experiencing production delays and falling short of delivery goals—hasn’t always lived up to the bullish expectations of analysts and its legion of passionate fans. And the Tesla/SolarCity merger drew fire from critics who question whether the acquisition will benefit shareholders. But many still look to him as one of the tech world’s foremost civic-minded voices. Musk advises President Trump as part of the Strategic and Policy Forum.