Kazuhiro Tsuga

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.