Businessperson of the Year

businessperson of the year

Concrete results. They’re what drive Fortune’s annual ranking of corporate chieftains. Of course, intangibles and inspiration matter. But what counts most for companies is the ability to generate cold, hard cash. What follows is an assemblage of superstars who navigated the inevitable turmoil this year and led their companies to stellar and, yes, concrete results. <a href="http://fortune.com/video/2015/11/12/nike-ceo-mark-parker-business-person-of-the-year-2015" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Learn more about the list here.</a>

A sneaker designer and company lifer (who was even part of the development team for early iterations of Air Jordans), Mark Parker is a former runner (and still occasionally designs limited-run shoes) with a long track record of success. But his introverted personality and role as successor to famed Nike co-founder Phil Knight have kept his achievements from receiving their full due. Consider these numbers: Since taking the helm in 2006, Parker has doubled revenues and profits at the already-mature company and raised Nike’s stock price six-fold. As Knight himself puts it, “It’s about time the media discovered Mark Parker.” 
Read "<a href="http://fortune.com/2015/11/12/nike-ceo-mark-parker/" target="_blank">Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year: Nike CEO Mark Parker</a>" here.

Mark Parker

It’s hard to overstate Facebook’s dominance on the social web. Its namesake product has 1.5 billion monthly users; its subsidiaries WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram reach a respective 900 million, 700 million, and 400 million people each month. Remember how people once scoffed at Facebook’s chances of turning a profit? It’s safe to say Zuckerberg has answered that challenge: Facebook had $2.9 billion in earnings in 2014. The company accounts for one of every five minutes Americans spend on mobile phones, a fact not lost on the advertisers plowing increasingly large sums into its highly targeted ad products. The result? Operating margins exceeding 25% and year-over-year revenue growth above 40%.

Mark Zuckerberg

Electronic Arts was left for dead a few years ago, amid proclamations that companies that design games for consoles were toast. The company endured four years of brutal losses—a total of $2.5 billion—before stabilizing. Wilson took over in September 2013 and sought to unify the struggling company around what he calls a “player-first culture”: Rigorous in quality but agnostic as to platform (in many cases combining elements of more than one). Sales of EA’s core console games have come roaring back even as the company ramps up digital sales. After its years in blood red, in 2014 EA racked up $875 million in earnings, according to data from S&amp;P Capital IQ. Profits are still humming, and another stellar potential hit looms: EA is about to release its new Star Wars Battlefront game.

Andrew Wilson

Cook has successfully navigated the transition to the post–Steve Jobs era, gradually changing the company’s culture, refocusing its social mission, and even earning praise for the first new-from-scratch product launch (the Apple Watch) of his time. The latest iPhones set yet another first-week record, and their sales—including boffo numbers in China (an overall 84% surge in the Middle Kingdom)—spurred 31% profit growth in the most recent quarter. Under Cook, Apple has debuted services such as Apple Pay and Apple Music. The cumulative result: an eye-popping $53 billion in profits in the past 12 months.

Tim Cook

Fortune once described companies like Square as harbingers of the new cashless society. Well, Square may have been the harbinger, but MasterCard is the one cashing in. Under Banga, MasterCard has doubled profits and revenue in five years, and he has been aggressively acquiring companies to <a href="http://fortune.com/2014/07/24/mastercard-tech-company/">build its technological edge</a>. Says Barclays analyst Darrin Peller: “In the long term it’s going to set them up to succeed technologically. He’s got the energy to get things done faster than his competitors.” This year Banga signed a 10-year deal that locks in almost all Citi cards as MasterCards and a similar 20-year deal with Itaú Unibanco in Brazil. Shares are up 40% in the past two years as MasterCard swipes its way toward $10 billion in revenue.

Ajay Banga

Ulta Beauty is a workhorse in the glamour business. It has found the magic formula for the increasingly crowded beauty arena, offering products across the price spectrum, providing salon services, and operating stores in strip malls close to consumers. This strategy has helped Ulta report some of the strongest numbers in retail and withstand the ambitious makeovers that giants like Target, Walgreens, and Kohl’s are giving their beauty sections: Ulta’s comparable sales in the first half of the year rose 10.1%. Mary Dillon, CEO for two years, is wisely spending to bolster Ulta’s e-commerce backbone and its stores while still managing to boost the company’s operating income as a percentage of sales. Ulta plans to add several hundred stores by 2019 to reach 1,200 locations. Meanwhile, the company has generated a 42% stock increase over the past 12 months, roughly 38 percentage points better than the S&amp;P 500.

Mary Dillon

Until Uber passed it in July, Xiaomi was the world’s most highly valued startup, at $46 billion. Wait—a Chinese smartphone company worth what? Lei Jun and Xiaomi have spent the better part of this year explaining why that optimism is justified. It’s about more than just phones. The company has so far invested in a couple dozen device companies—with plans to fund at least 100—selling air purifiers, GoPro-like cameras, and hi-fi headphones in a bid to create an ecosystem that will replicate the success of Apple’s universe. Xiaomi’s backers say it makes money selling phones. But Xiaomi is trying to prove to skeptics that it can do much more.

Lei Jun

If we were awarding the Businessperson of the Year crown based solely on disruption, money raising, valuation (reportedly now flirting with $70 billion), and all the intangibles that make Kalanick a blazing—albeit controversial—sun in the business universe, he’d be the easy winner for his car-hailing company and its major role in creating the sharing economy. Those qualities are enough to vault him into the top 10, but the company’s youth and acknowledged lack of profits (not to mention a reported annual burn rate of $750 million and opposition to the company massing in a number of cities around the globe) prevent him from reaching the pinnacle—for now.

Travis Kalanick

Chipotle’s co-CEOs don’t just serve burritos; they’ve also altered what was long seen as an immutable equation: fast food = junk food. No longer. Chipotle has inspired a generation of “natural” quick-serve restaurants and forced behemoths like McDonald’s to rethink their practices. In 2015 Ells and Moran swore off GMO ingredients and suspended a pork supplier for violating its animal-welfare standards. The ensuing carnitas shortage only improved the company’s image. Chipotle continues to beef up revenues and earnings, even fattening its margins as it expands. Still, the fiesta can’t continue indefinitely; same-store sales growth is slowing, and an E. coli outbreak in the Northwest could drive away some customers. Their recipe to stay hot: Invest in delivery and mobile ordering and expand the company’s nascent ShopHouse and Pizzeria Locale chains.

Steve Ells and Montgomery Moran

Since joining Biogen as CEO in 2010, Scangos has taken a highly profitable company, more than doubled its revenue, and more than tripled its earnings. And he has done so while upping the R&amp;D budget 52% between 2010 and 2014. Today, Biogen seems afflicted with the curse of high expectations. Investors are apparently disappointed with projected sales and earnings growth of, respectively, 9% and 19% this year. In part because of that, Biogen wasn’t immune to this year’s plague in biotech stocks (worsened by lower-than-expected demand for its multiple sclerosis drug Tecfidera). Scangos’s remedy: He’s bolstering marketing and narrowing focus to a few research areas, while cutting 11% of Biogen’s workforce. Will that cure the ailing stock price? Perhaps not. But if profit growth of 19% is considered anemic, most CEOs would happily accept the condition.

George Scangos

Fortune’s 2014 Businessperson of the Year electrified the business world with far-out “moon shots” like self-driving cars, balloons that provide Internet connections, and life-extending science. This year, Page signaled that he intends to make those side projects into real businesses, reorganizing Google into a holding company called Alphabet. It will be years before the “Other Bets” segment turns a profit, but until then investors can take comfort in the healthy operating margins—26% on average this year—of Google’s advertising business. Revenue grew 20% annually for the past three years, with profits ascending at a comparable rate, even amid aggressive competition for mobile ad budgets from the likes of Facebook.

Larry Page

If you want to see the future of retail, look no further than Starbucks. Under Schultz, it is becoming as much a tech behemoth as it is a coffee giant. He has made big hires from Adobe Systems and Juniper Networks and is leading the industry with its integrated rewards program and mobile ordering and payment; a fifth of the company’s U.S. transactions now take place on mobile. Cracking the code on delivery is next. The transformation is paying off. Starbucks has enjoyed 23 consecutive quarters of same-store-sales growth of 5% or more, along with record revenue and operating income and a market cap approaching $100 billion. Schultz has defied critics by proving that the company has yet to reach its saturation point; he increased store traffic and built new locations that are brewing up scalding sales in their first year. His “Race Together” initiative fell flat, but the damage was brief: Schultz’s name was floated as a possible presidential candidate.

Howard Schultz

Frozen warmed Disney’s bottom line considerably in 2014, but profits have continued to rise with movies such as Avengers: Age of Ultron from Marvel Studios (a canny Iger acquisition) and Inside Out from Pixar (an earlier masterstroke purchase by Iger). Yet another of his bold pickups, Lucasfilm, will soon release one of the most highly anticipated flicks in years, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Already the film is driving strong merchandise sales (demand for presale tickets even caused websites like fandango.com to crash). Despite a modest revenue miss in its most recent quarter and concern about softness at ESPN, the Star Wars sequel suggests the curtains aren’t coming down on the company’s blockbusters just yet.

Robert Iger

The world’s largest contract manufacturer for chips, Taiwan Semiconductor has been managing an impressive feat under founder Chang: spending big on R&amp;D and still managing healthy (35%) net income margins. The formula has led to 60% cumulative revenue and earnings growth over the past three years. The company’s mobile business has stood out as it secured a contract to produce some A9 chips for Apple’s iPhone. Still, the outlook for 2016 is sobering, and Taiwan Semiconductor will have to fend off the likes of Samsung to compete to make the next-generation A10 chip. But its breadth of customers—Qualcomm, Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD, and many others—should help it defend its position.

Morris Chang

Who could object to a crackdown on graft in China? The sellers of luxury items—often given as gifts to officials—that’s who. Still, LVMH has weathered the crackdown thanks to Arnault’s global diversification. Sales of alcohol, perfume, and watches have gleamed, offsetting weakness at its fashion business, which includes Louis Vuitton. Don’t underestimate LVMH’s discipline: It boasts profit margins roughly twice those of rival Kering. So even as LVMH’s revenue has leveled off around $37 billion in the past three years, profits have climbed 50%, from $4.5 billion to $6.8 billion.

Bernard Arnault

No other company has appeared more times on Fortune’s list of Fastest-Growing Companies than Cognizant. Revenue exploded by a factor of 20 and profits by a factor of 15 over the past decade at this infotech outsourcer and consultancy. D’Souza is the company’s youthful (47) and dynamic chief. The son of an Indian diplomat, he taught himself programming in high school, joined Cognizant in 1994, and has been CEO since 2007. Financial services is the company’s stalwart sector, but D’Souza has kept Cognizant on the cutting edge not only with digital services, analytics, and cloud services but also by expanding its health care segment with organic revenue growth (16% last year) and its biggest acquisition to date (a health care IT-services provider called TriZetto). The ascent isn’t over either: The company says it’s on track for sales growth of 20.1% in 2015.

Francisco D’Souza

Barbara Rentler has had the unenviable task of competing with TJX, one of retail’s fastest-growing stories for years. But on her watch, Ross is more than holding its own: Comparable sales rose 5% in the first half of 2015 as the off-price retailer has continued to win over bargain-hunting department-store shoppers for whom T.J. Maxx is still a bit too pricey. And its gross margin has grown despite stiffening competition thanks to hyperefficient buying processes she has overseen. Rentler’s strategy has been to choose markets she can win and fill those in with Ross stores, rather than dot the U.S. map with stores. Rentler thinks there is room to double store count to 2,500. There is plenty of untouched territory: Ross has no stores in New England or New York yet. Rentler will get there.

Barbara Rentler

What Chinese slowdown? Ping An, the country’s life insurance giant, recorded a 32% quarterly profit increase for the third quarter (vs. the year earlier). Founder Ma has adroitly harnessed the rise of the Chinese middle class. Ping An’s results have been superb as it diversifies into banking and finance, including what the company says are now 145 million “Internet finance” customers. Twelve-month revenues—$105 billion, according to S&amp;P Capital IQ—were more than triple the company’s total in 2010, and profits ($8.8 billion) nearly doubled the figure for 2013.

Ma Mingzhe

Earlier this year, when CNBC’s Jim Cramer noted that Skyworks’s chips are in just about every major provider’s cellphones, Aldrich corrected the Mad Money host. “No,” he said, “we’re in everybody.” That means its radio chips are in everything from thermostats to routers for customers including Cisco, Dell, GE, Google, Huawei, and LG. Biggest of all: Apple’s iPhone accounts for 36% of sales, according to analyst estimates. No surprise, Skyworks’s numbers have been soaring skyward.

David Aldrich

If you had to guess the world’s biggest meat seller, you’d be hard-pressed to think of JBS. But this 62-year-old family-run Brazilian company has been on an acquisition rampage for more than a decade: Swift, Pilgrim’s Pride, and units of Smithfield, Tyson, and Cargill have disappeared into its maw. No surprise: JBS’s sales have risen nearly 30-fold over a decade. JBS is still digesting a lot of debt but is improving its margins. Its shares are up 40% over 12 months even as Brazil’s index has slumped by 20%.

Wesley Batista

When Michael Neidorff took charge at Centene in 1996, it was a regional Medicaid insurer with $40 million in revenues. Today, it’s a managed care behemoth with about $20 billion in revenues over the past 12 months and 4.6 million members in 23 states. The transformation of U.S. healthcare created the opening—and Neidorff grabbed it. “He has read the market opportunities pretty accurately and positioned his company to take advantage of them,” says Thomas Carroll, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus. Now one of the nation’s largest Medicaid contractors, Centene has skillfully expanded—with more than 25 acquisitions on Neidorff’s watch—into Medicare, prison healthcare, and the lucrative specialty pharmacy business. Centene’s prognosis is still healthy: The company is projecting a 16% revenue increase in 2016.

Michael Neidorff

Two years ago, Delta set up a hub in Alaska Air’s home base of Seattle for the first time—akin to declaring war. The swaggering arrival of an industry behemoth posed an imminent threat to the regional player. Instead, Alaska Air has taken off: Its stock price climbed 115% in the past two years and profits during the past 12 months were 60% higher than two years ago. Industry veterans credit Tilden, a company lifer who became CEO in 2012. “This is an airline I marked a couple of years back as being an endangered species,” says aviation consultant Jay Sorensen. “Instead the airline has come out of this stronger and better. Tilden is such a humble man and smart leader, and he has the kind of touch that makes an airline human.” Tilden flies coach, and on a 2013 flight after the hometown Seattle Seahawks had just won the Super Bowl, he got up and served passengers as a flight attendant.

Bradley Tilden

Congdon took the wheel of his family trucking business in a most inauspicious year—2008—and managed to stay in the black in recession-wracked 2009. During his tenure, he has more than doubled revenues and raised profits by a factor of five. Congdon’s upgrades of the company’s IT network and infrastructure help Old Dominion vie for business with much bigger rivals like FedEx Freight and UPS Ground. A key part of the company’s appeal: Its customer-first attitude. Old Dominion boasts an on-time ratio of 99% and the lowest percentage—0.32%—of damaged cargo claims in the industry.

David Congdon

Regeneron is a research-oriented biotech, founded by Schleifer, that had no product on the market for its first 20 years. Today its monoclonal antibodies, particularly Eylea for retinal diseases, are producing major cash injections for the company. Indeed, Eylea is on track for mega-blockbuster status and Regeneron, which eked out $446 million in revenues in 2011, rang up $3.8 billion in revenues and $581 million in profits over the past 12 months. The company may have just the prescription to keep profits flush: The FDA recently approved its first-in-class anti-cholesterol drug—developed with Sanofi and priced, at $14,600 a year, dramatically higher than statins—and Regeneron’s pipeline, which is among the most promising in the business. Despite the pox on biotech stocks this year, Regeneron’s shares are up a robust 36%.

Leonard Schleifer

The company is, as Fortune once wrote, “like a mash-up of Amazon, eBay, PayPal—and Yahoo.” But it’s unlike those well-known names in a crucial way: It made $3.9 billion in profits on $12.3 billion in revenues last year. As with most big Chinese enterprises, there are reasons for caution: The stock has slumped and the company’s first two quarters this year were tepid compared to 2014. But in its most recent quarter, Alibaba rebounded dramatically, with a 32% sales increase and 30% rise in earnings per share. One particularly promising sign for the company and new CEO Daniel Zhang: Alibaba’s revenue from mobile advertising nearly tripled compared to equivalent figure a year ago.

Jack Ma

It’s been more than four decades since the then-24-year-old Goldfarb took the CEO reins from his father, Aron, a Holocaust survivor who founded the company. Morris reorganized G-III from a small leather coat store that specialized in men’s bomber jackets to an apparel empire that has licenses with countless big labels, including Calvin Klein, Jessica Simpson, Kenneth Cole, Cole Haan, Guess, Ivanka Trump, and even a new sports line from Jimmy Fallon. Athleisure and athletics have helped G-III spin out great results of late. In 2011, the company announced a license with Calvin Klein women’s sportswear, outerwear and performance apparel. And G-III’s massive sports business includes the Starter brand and licenses for team-branded clothes and other items with the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and more than 100 U.S. colleges and universities. The company’s profits over the most recent 12-month period, according to S&amp;P CapitalIQ, are more than twice the figure for 2013.

Morris Goldfarb

Knowledge is power, and Tencent has plenty of both in China. Its WeChat social network is the country’s Facebook equivalent and allows Tencent to tap into the lives of 600 million users, offering taxis, online banking, and other services. In the third quarter, revenue climbed 34% to $4.2 billion, profits also rose 34%, to $1.2 billion, and net profit margin stayed steady at 34%. Oh, and amid a Chinese stock market crash, Tencent shares are up a tidy 24% over the past year.

Pony Ma

Since 2007, when Meyrowitz took the helm at TJX, the parent of TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and Homegoods, among others, the company’s revenue has grown 67%, from $17.4 billion to $29.1 billion. In 2015, the discount retailer generated more sales even than longtime industry leader Macy’s. Under Meyrowitz, TJX continues to expand, with more than 3,300 stores around the globe. Her strategy of constantly rotating in new items for a limited time at bargain prices entices customers to purchase more urgently and keeps them hooked on finding new deals. To keep pace with the rapid product turnover, she has also made it a priority to hire and train good buyers. Meyrowitz recently demonstrated some buying prowess of her own, purchasing a small Australian chain—and more importantly access to the Australian market—for less than $60 million. It’s a fittingly smart move for Meyrowitz, who plans to step down as CEO at the end of 2015.

Carol Meyrowitz

The use of mobile phones has dramatically changed the way consumers shop and pay. Companies that grasp this can cash in big in developing countries, where money is often moved via prepaid cellphones. After becoming CEO in 2012, Scharf’s many visits to startups led to the launch of Visa Digital Solutions, an initiative that provides APIs (essentially, tools to build software) to outside developers and encourages innovation and collaboration. Scharf also oversaw the introduction of a digital wallet, Checkout. Scharf has jumped into emerging markets, overseeing Visa’s newly opened tech development center in Bangalore, India, which will play a vital role in expanding the company’s reach. Scharf has pushed for partnerships with mobile networks such as Telenor in Pakistan to link Visa with mobile phones. This summer, the company will launch a new mobile payment service, mVisa, with 20,000 merchants in Bangalore and in partnership with Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and SBI (State Bank of India). Meanwhile, Scharf has improved Visa’s relations with card-issuing banks in its older markets and kept right on churning out profits: $6.3 billion of them in the past 12 months (compared to $4.9 billion two years ago).

Charles Scharf

After boldly bucking Japanese corporate culture to save his company through massive layoffs and brutal cost-cutting, Panasonic president Kazuhiro Tsuga has spent 2015 reshaping the global electronics giant—long known for its consumer products—into a growing, profitable provider of business-to-business systems, housing, and ‘green’ innovation (including a high-profile partnership with Tesla Motors to build electric batteries.) In three years under Tsuga’s leadership, Panasonic has returned to profitability, restored its dividend, and doubled its stock price. Now in expansion and acquisition mode, Tsuga, a 59-year-old Panasonic lifer with a passion for “muscular” cars (he earned a masters degree in California), has set a goal of boosting the company’s annual sales by nearly 30% from its most recent full-year results, to 10 trillion yen (about $80 billion U.S.), by fiscal 2019.

Kazuhiro Tsuga

Robert Half’s 22 straight quarters of double-digit net income growth reflect Messmer’s sustained success at the staffing firm. Since becoming CEO in 1986, Messmer has propelled company revenues from $7 million to $4.7 billion in 2014 and close to $5 billion is expected this year. The company, best known for accounting and finance placements—70% of them for temporary or consulting assignments—is building up its business in tech. The improving U.S. economy and increasing competition for tech talent have fueled recent growth. Recognizing the need to keep hires happy, Messmer has made Robert Half one of the top places to work by creating an open and transparent culture that promotes innovation.

Harold Messmer

Since becoming CEO of the now $30-billion management consulting and technology services firm in 2011, Nanterme has had his head in the cloud—that is, the software-via-the-Internet version. In practical terms, that means 18 acquisitions so far in 2015. Most recently, Accenture acquired Cloud Sherpas, which brought 1,100 more cloud specialists into the fold. Thanks largely to the CEO’s philosophy, the company developed digital services, such as Accenture Digital (which helps clients digitize their own businesses) earlier than competitors. In the third quarter of fiscal 2015, such services, including big data algorithms, increased 35% (compared to the same quarter a year ago) and represented more than 20% of Accenture’s revenue. Under Nanterme, the company is also overhauling its approach to its own management. In September it axed annual reviews and rankings. Nanterme told the Washington Post that Accenture will eliminate 90% of what it did in the past, showing admirable flexibility for a company that traces its past to a spinoff of the late Arthur Andersen accounting firm.

Pierre Nanterme

Sure, you can buy a carburetor for your John Deere at Tractor Supply, but the cognoscenti know that the chain’s stores are geared less to professional farmers and more toward regular folks looking for home and garden items. Sandfort joined the company in 2007—which has now reaped nearly two decades of relentless increases in annual revenues and profits—as chief merchandising officer. He became CEO in 2013. Sandfort has cultivated a one-stop shopping experience; whether customers need fencing for containing cattle or riding mowers and pet supplies, they can get it all in his store. One analyst says she can’t think of another publicly traded company that focuses so much on the consumer. Sandfort’s success has won him “kind of a cult following on the Street,” according to an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities. Indeed, when Gregg Steinhafel resigned as Target’s top executive last year, Sandfort’s name came up as a potential candidate.

Gregory Sandfort

In 2010 Alber ascended to the top job at the chain that epitomizes kitchens as upper- middle-class fantasyland—all gorgeous copper pans and colanders that gleam like sterling silver (and seem to cost almost as much). Since then she has delivered tasty stock performance: a cumulative 160%, nearly double the S&amp;P 500’s gain during that period. Just five years ago, the $4.8 billion company struggled with shaky online sales, but now it’s one of the country’s biggest e-tailers with nearly half of its sales online. In the most recent quarter Alber heated up revenues 8.5% in part by adopting technologies aimed at improving the customer experience. Williams-Sonoma launched its first app, Recipe of the Day, partnered with YouTube to offer shoppable online videos, and enabled Visa Checkout as a secure and easy way to pay online. The CEO also promoted in-store events, like panini-making classes, and announced plans to add 11 stores to its fastest-growing brand, West Elm, which has brought home double-digit growth in recent years.

Laura Alber

After its Shape-up shoes tripped Skechers up—the company settled FTC charges that it made excessive claims about their effect on losing weight and toning muscle—at the end of 2011, Greenberg shaped up the company’s operations and marketing to reach a record market cap of $8 billion this summer. He followed that by announcing the highest quarterly sales in the company’s 23-year history in October—but the stock fell sharply because Skechers missed its earnings target due to unexpectedly high costs. Increases in international sales and expanding retail operations, with a goal of over 1,280 Skechers’ stores worldwide by the end of 2015, have pushed sales upward. Greenberg’s effective marketing campaigns—Kim Kardashian, Demi Lovato and Ringo Starr all endorse products—have helped the company sprint past competition like Adidas to become the No. 2 sports-footwear brand in America (behind only Nike) and the No. 1 kids-footwear brand worldwide.

Robert Greenberg

Second only to Nike in U.S. sports apparel sales, Under Armour is flexing its digital muscles as 62 million people now log on to one of its apps every month. CEO Plank built that “community” by shelling out $710 million this year—the equivalent of the company’s last three years of pre-tax profits—on three fitness apps: MyFitnessPal ($475 million), MapMyFitness ($150 million), and Endomondo (85 million). Plank thinks apps and gadgets will help him compete with Google, Apple, Jawbone, and Fitbit. His rationale is that fitness apps encourage people to work out, leading them to buy more attire. Under Armour’s sales continue to bulk up, with a 20% improvement in the 12 months ended Sept. 30 (compared to 2014), according to S&amp;P CapitalIQ. Because of all the spending, however, profits only inched upward. In three years, the company expects annual sales to double to $7.5 billion.

Kevin Plank

During Martin’s 19-year tenure as CEO, Gilead’s shares have risen 100-fold (including a 157% gain in the past two years). In recent years the company’s growth has been of the organic variety, with the development of two blockbuster drugs that are currently on track to exceed $15 billion in combined sales by the end of 2015. Those two hits, Sovaldi, a hepatitis C treatment said to cure 90% of patients, and its successor, Harvoni, have propelled Gilead to record prosperity: The company, which has a market value of $149 billion, saw sales double and profits quadruple last year. Over the past 12 months, the company’s profit margins have exceeded 50% and earlier this year, Martin surprised analysts by announcing he was “taking suggestions on companies to buy.”

John Martin

Thor’s brand may not be as recognizable to the layperson as rival Winnebago, but it generates more than four times the revenues. The recreational vehicle company shares a name with the Norse god of Sky and Thunder, but in this case the "Th" represents co-founder Wade Thompson and the "Or" is for co-founder Peter Orthwein. Thor has been enjoying a pristine climate—and rocking results. In just two years as CEO, Martin—an industry veteran who was previously Thor’s COO—has had the company’s pedal to the metal as revenues have accelerated by a cumulative 23% and profits have sped up 30%, according to S&amp;P CapitalIQ. Of course, good timing never hurts, and Martin is presiding at a moment when Baby Boomers are surging into retirement and, apparently, zesting for an RV and the open road. And that wave of new retirees should continue for some years. 
Update: An earlier version of this entry incorrectly described the origins of Thor's name and incorrectly attributed to Martin a prediction about future growth.

Robert Martin

Times have been shockingly good in the airlines business in recent years, with low oil prices just the latest boon. Sure enough profits and margins for Southwest, the industry’s stalwart, have been flying high. Meanwhile the company is expanding, spending $156 million on an international terminal at Hobby Airport in Houston, as it expands service to 50 cities in Central and South America by 2020. Under Kelly, as <a href="http://fortune.com/2015/09/23/southwest-airlines-business-travel/" target="_blank">Fortune chronicled recently</a>, Southwest is looking more like its rivals. It is serving bigger airports—a change of course for an operation that flew past competitors for decades with short-haul flights to smaller airports for quicker turnaround and cheaper tickets. And Kelly, who’s been in the pilot seat since 2004, is shifting gears to attract the high-fare-paying, long-distance traveling business customer, whose spending is growing faster than any other in U.S. air travel. In 2014, Southwest carried more passengers in the U.S. than any other airline and was a top-performing stock, posting a 122% return.

Gary Kelly

When Cordani isn’t busy competing in a reported 125 triathlons, he runs his company like a dedicated athlete. Since his appointment as CEO of the health insurer at the start of 2010 (he’s been with the company for decades), Cigna’s size has doubled, its customer base is up 16%, and its stock has climbed about 30% a year. In 2015, he led Cigna into a mega-merger with rival Anthem during a wave of healthcare mergers and acquisition. If approved by regulators, the proposed $54 billion deal would create the largest U.S. health insurer by membership and reduce the industry’s consolidation from five national players to three.

David Cordani

The most tantalizing tidbit about Magna these days is a mere rumor: That the world’s second-largest automotive supplier will partner with Apple to develop an electric car. The closest Walker has come to confirming or denying the reports is to aver that his company, headquartered just outside of Toronto, would the “logical” choice. Back in the real world, Walker has been on a buying binge, acquiring six major auto parts supplier so far this year. This isn’t the first time he has been in the driver’s seat at Magna. The first time—from 1994 through 2001—Walker was lauded for saving so much cash that Magna was beyond prepared when the financial crisis hit. Walker stepped down in 2001, but returned in 2005 to become co-CEO before taking sole charge in 2010. His recent spending notwithstanding, Walker has maintained financial discipline with profits rising much faster (more than doubling) than revenues (up nearly 50%) during the past five years.

Donald Walker

Unlike her short-tenured predecessor, Jay Johnson, who made a series of acquisitions outside the defense giant’s core areas and exited after a traumatic loss, Novakovic has restored profits by, as she says, “doing what we know how to do.” <a href="http://fortune.com/2015/09/11/phebe-novakovic-general-dynamics/" target="_blank">Since the former CIA operative</a> took command in 2013, Novakovic has been busy in its more traditional missions: building major military hardware and business jets, like the M1 Abrams tank, nuclear submarines, as well as Gulfstream jets. Last year, the company landed a contract to deliver $10 billion worth of armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia and received a $17.6 billion order to build Virginia-class attack submarines for the U.S. Navy in partnership with Huntington Ingalls Industries. In going back to basics, Novakovic has led the company to four consecutive quarters with more than $1 billion in operating earnings. Still revenues have been flat and analysts say Novakovic’s next mission is to find new avenues of growth and revenue to keep the stock from submerging.

Phebe Novakovic

Boyle has spent the better part of his life in what was originally a family business. As a boy, he tested new products for his mother Gert— matriarch of the company—before they went on the market. In 1970, as a senior at the University of Oregon, Boyle’s recruitment into the company came earlier than expected when his father died of a heart attack. Since then Columbia has endured tough stretches—and enjoyed some highly successful ones. Initially, the mother-son team struggled as the company teetered on bankruptcy before they refocused the brand from formal work attire to outdoor clothing. Decades later, the company weathered another stormy period after a poor production decision caused sales to stall from 2005 to 2009. Boyle brought in a new team of scientists to develop gear that would set the company apart from its competitors. The result: After obtaining one patent in the company’s first 68 years, Columbia now has more than 200 global patents for products such as a space-blanket jacket and a cooling T-shirt. After continued struggles, he brought in new managers in 2013. Boyle’s strategic decisions are finally paying off again: The company achieved record sales of $2.1 billion in 2014 and shares have risen 25% this year. The company is back in the limelight with its recent global campaign "Tested Tough,” which features 91-year-old Gert—still chairman—in ads that conjure up the company’s successful “Tough Mother” campaign in the 1980s.

Tim Boyle

Huston has been at the Priceline Group since only 2014, but the CEO is making big moves and they’re already paying off: The company sold $50 billion worth of travel in 2014 and posted an 11% increase in profits in its most recent quarter. Huston shapes the company in two ways: First, his experience in digital at Microsoft and consumer services at Starbucks have made him a meticulous, hands-on operator. One of the Priceline Group's units, Booking.com, employs A/B testing on every aspect of an app, website, and advertisement. In fact, the CEO says there isn’t a “semicolon on any of [their] sites that isn’t A/B tested.” Consequently, the Priceline Group’s mobile apps are ranked as some of the best travel offerings around. Second, Huston’s made some promising acquisitions in his short reign. Last year, he bought restaurant-reservation site OpenTable. He has also made smaller, strategic investments, acquiring Hotel Ninjas and Buuteeq, firms that provide management software and digital marketing services to hotels. Those units will expand the company’s back-office technology and provide software to optimize the company’s dealings with 600,000-plus lodging operations.

Darren Huston

You wouldn’t want a wood-products company to be, er, lumbering—but deep roots help. The latter might explain why CEO Missad, who started working at the company as part of a maintenance crew in high school, is leading the company to unprecedented heights. The company just reported the best third-quarter results in its history and its profits over the past 12 months, according to S&amp;P CapitalIQ, are three times what they were just three years ago. Despite slumps in the lumber market, Missad continues to implement new programs, such as ones that train contractors how to use the company’s products. In 2015, the company made its first acquisition outside of North America, landing it for the first time in the Australian market.

Matthew Missad

Since Iordanou became CEO in November 2009 (he had already been at the company for years before that), Arch Capital’s stock has enjoyed a premium 230% rise (vs. 100% for the S&amp;P 500 during the period.) Iordanou has expanded and diversified the portfolio of this Bermuda-based insurer and re-insurer, adding lines such as private mortgage insurance. He’s not done yet: Iordanou has told reporters that the company is always “looking for other avenues to grow,” citing areas such as reinsurance for mortality-only life insurance. Iordanou knows a little about risk first-hand: The son of a police officer in Cyprus, according to Risk &amp; Insurance, he came to the U.S. on his own by ship and worked his way through New York University, then learned the insurance ropes at AIG and then Berkshire Hathaway.

Constantine Iordanou

The Beast of Redmond feels undeniably less fearsome than in days of yore and CEO Nadella faces the unpleasant task of grappling with the slow decline of the company’s once impregnable bulwarks as he tackles the challenge of shifting from a world centered around the PC and purchased software to a universe of mobile devices and streamed (or even free) software. But Nadella is rising to the task. Microsoft’s Surface tablet/PC passed $1 billion in annual sales, can be seen on the sidelines in NFL games, and feels like a bona fide offering (as opposed to an embarrassing me-too like the Zune). A two-decade company veteran who took the CEO helm in 2014, Nadella is betting big on Project HoloLens, an augmented headset that layers the virtual and digital worlds on top of what your eyes see of the real world (as opposed to locking you entirely inside the VR headsets, as rivals do). Microsoft doesn’t produce the outlandish profits of the past—though $12 billion for 2014 is nothing to sneeze at—but investors are showing signs they think Nadella can lead the company to success in the new world: Its long moribund shares are up 45% since Nadella became CEO—more than doubling the S&amp;P 500 and the Nasdaq.

Satya Nadella

If he weren’t quite so taciturn, this former accountant might be recognized as being, as Fortune called him in 2013, “the most powerful man in the U.S. health care industry.” But Hemsley is a numbers man, so let’s look at the figures: Since taking over as CEO in late 2006, he has more than doubled the company’s revenues, to a massive $147 billion in the past 12 months. He has elevated profits from just over $4 billion to a tad more than $6 billion. All the while, his company’s stock has escalated steadily upward, a total of about 130%. Hemsley’s “open innovation culture”—for example, he encourages employees to post, comment, on vote on each other’s ideas—has helped his company land on Fortune’s “World’s Most Admired Companies” list again and again. Recent improvements have been driven by the company’s technology and its data analytics arm, Optum, which has emerged as a major player. And Hemsley has predicted that Optum could eventually generate the majority of the company’s revenues.

Stephen Hemsley

A longtime veteran of the company (most recently as COO), Johnson had big shoes to fill when he took over for Ken Hicks at the end of 2014. Hicks is revered for kickstarting Foot Locker’s previously stagnant sales. First on Johnson’s agenda: constructing a powerful digital infrastructure to keep up with racing online demand. So far he’s off to a good start: The company experienced its most profitable quarter ever at the beginning of 2015 and online sales grew 50% year over year. Johnson’s five-year plan is a full-family experience, connecting parents and kids in stores and online, with a focus on women and kids.

Richard Johnson

Lighting—commercial and residential, indoor and outdoor, traditional and LED—is Acuity’s game. Since the U.S. construction industry revived after the recession, Nagel (CEO since 2004) has illuminated the path to growth with strategic acquisitions and collaborations with city and state governments. In the past year, he positioned Acuity as a leader in high-tech lighting through three acquisitions: Distech Controls, ByteLight, and Juno Lighting. Moves like this have led to eight consecutive quarters of double-digit sales volume increases. In 2015, annual sales jumped 13% to $2.7 billion while profit surged 26% to $222.1 million. Next up? Nagel recently announced that investments will go into redesigning facilities to include open workspaces and new infrastructures to attract the best talent, provide employees “with the best work environment possible and the tools and technologies necessary” to drive future success—and create an innovative culture that will continue lighting the company’s way to profits.