Business Leaders to Be Admired and Why

In an open-market system which encourages innovation, while providing for the basic framework of health and education that enables that innovation, business entrepreneurs have the greatest power to impact lives positively by bringing about welcome disruption that results in 1) new products to the consumer they didn’t previously know they wanted and 2) new growth in an industry that may not have even existed before.

In reading this article in Total Retail Magazine at mytotalretail.com/longform/retailer-of-the-year-barry-beck-bluemercury/, I came across a Top Three list of the most admired business leaders (the person being interviewed, himself a successful retail business owner (Barry Beck), mentioned Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Phil Knight of Nike as his rule-breaking problem-solving game-changers. 

I’m inspired by this to think of my own list, and here it is (in no particular order - and arbitrarily capped at three): Bill Gates of Microsoft, Sheila Johnson of BET and Elon Musk of PayPal/Tesla/SpaceX/The Boring Company.

The reasons for these should be intuitively obvious, but to state the obvious anyway: Gates created something we didn’t know we needed - software - and made it indispensable; Johnson, as a black woman, bucked every conceivable trend to become a fabulous business success in television and other ventures; Musk has made a career out of engineering the impossible and making it seem much less so.

All of the above, it must be noted, have established important philanthropic foundations. In fact, Gates is now no longer the world’s richest person - Bezos currently is - precisely because he and his wife Melinda have given so much of their personal fortune to their Foundation and other avenues of blessed assistance (with remarkable progress toward eradicating the lethal scourge of tropical malaria). 

Nothing’s more admirable than a business leader who helps others’ lives improve too.

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