The cut-throat corporate world is no place for
shrinking violets. All the same, a
little humility goes a long way. Along
with oodles of ego, a successful CEO must possess creativity, conviction and leadership
qualities, combined with many other attributes to achieve greatness in business. Here we look at four of the 21st Century's
best.
Indra Nooyi
Indra Nooyi is CEO of Pepsi, the second largest
food and beverage producer in the world.
She ranks 13 in the 2014 Forbes list of the World's 100 Most Powerful
Women.
Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi was born on 28th November
1955 in Madras, Tamil Nadu, India, receiving a bachelor's degree in Physics,
Chemistry and Mathematics, in 1974 from Madras Christian College as well as a
Post Graduate Diploma in Management in 1976 from the Indian Institute of Management,
Calcutta.
Nooyi began working for Pepsi in 1994, becoming
President in 2001. She has directed
Pepsi's global strategy for over 10 years and led the company's restructuring,
including its Yum! chain of
restaurants. She took a leading role in
the acquisition by Pepsi of the Tropicana brand in 1998, as well as the Quaker
Oats and Gatorade companies. Bloomberg
Business cite a 72% increase in Pepsi's annual revenues since Nooyi became CFO
in 2001, with net profits doubling to $5.6 billion in 2006. Indra Nooyi was named the Most Powerful Woman
in Business by Fortune in both 2009 and 2010.
She has received honours and awards from numerous bodies, including three
honorary degrees and five honorary doctorates.
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos is a well known name to executive Tony Freeman and fellow
entrepreneurs. Bezos is the CEO and
founder of the global corporation, Amazon.
Born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on 12th January 1964
in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986. He spent a spell working in the computer
science field on Wall Street before building an international trade network for
Fitel. After a stint with Bankers Trust
and D.E. Shaw & Co, Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994.
Bezos recounts that he took a cross country drive
to Seattle from New York, writing up the business plan for his new company on
the way. He originally set up shop in
his garage. Bezos had quit a well paid
job with a New York Hedge Fund to follow his dream after reading about the
recent surge in internet use. The
growing popularity of the worldwide web coincided with a US Supreme Court
ruling that mail order catalogues were not obligated to collect taxes in states
where they had no physical presence. Bezos
knew he was onto a winner. By 2011,
Amazon was worth $6.5 billion, its share price rising by some 70% in a single
year.
Bezos was named 2012's Businessperson of The Year
by Fortune, Person of the Year by Time in 1999 and was selected by the US News
and World Report as one of the US's greatest leaders in 2008.
Jack Ma
Jack Ma is an entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is also the founder and executive chairman
of the hugely successful Alibaba Group.
Jack Ma was born Ma Yun in Hangzhou, Zhejiang,
China on 10th September 1964 to traditional musician/storytellers. From a very young age, Ma wished to learn
English. He rode his bike every morning
to visit local hotels so that he might converse with foreigners. He would guide them around the local sites
for free in order that he could practice his English.
Ma studied at the Hangzhou Teacher's Institute,
graduating in 1988 with a bachelor's degree.
He went on to the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, graduating in
2006.
Ma began building websites for Chinese
companies. In 1995, he and his wife
Zhang Ying went on to build a Chinese version of Yellow Pages. Within three years, they had made $800,000
from a company they started with just $20.
Ma founded Alibaba with a group of 17 friends in
1999. Today, the company serves over 79
million members from 240 different countries.
Ma became the richest man in China in 2014 and ranks 18 on the Bloomberg
Billionaires Index with an estimated net worth of $29.7 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg is the creator and CEO of
Facebook. He was born Mark Elliot
Zuckerberg on 14th May 1984 in White Plains, New York. His father is a dentist and his mother a
psychiatrist. Zuckerberg's interest in
computers began at middle school. His
father began teaching him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, later hiring a
private tutor who called him a prodigy. Zuckerberg
took a graduate class at Mercy College whilst still studying in high
school. One of his early networks was ZuckNet, a
platform linking the computers in his parents' house to his father's dental
surgery. Whilst still at high school, he
programmed the Synapse Media Player ,which achieved a 3 out of 5 rating from PC
Magazine.
Zuckerberg's time at Harvard is the focus of the
2010 movie, The Social Network. He studied computer science and
psychology. It was here that he wrote
CourseMatch, a programme which allowed students to see which classes other
students had selected, thus helping them to choose their own classes according
to their affiliations and study groups.
Shortly afterwards, he wrote a programme called Facemash, encouraging
students to select the most attractive person from a selection of photos. The college shut his website down a day later
because the surge in traffic had overwhelmed its network.
Zuckerberg launched Facebook in January 2004. Three years later, aged just 23, he was a billionaire.
