The World's 50 Greatest Leaders

the world's 50 greatest leaders

Lydia Belanger

In business, government, philanthropy, and the arts, and all over the globe, these men and women are transforming the world and inspiring others to do the same. Read more about our sixth annual list <a href="http://fortune.com/longform/the-worlds-50-greatest-leaders-2019">here</a>.

For evidence of what happens when an unstoppable force — Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates — meets a profoundly movable human being, the empathetic Melinda Gates, one has simply to measure the impact of the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation. 
 
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From January 1995 through the end of 2017, that namesake philanthropy (along with earlier Gates family foundations that were merged into the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000) has deployed an extraordinary, barely countable $45.5 billion. That funding has launched, and then continually supported, what global health experts widely acknowledge to be some of the most successful international, private-public partnerships ever formed: GAVI, which has helped developing countries immunize 700 million children against preventable diseases. The second is The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. 
 
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But the impact of Bill and Melinda Gates is due to more than money. As Warren Buffett told Fortune, “The two of them have a multiplier effect—the two of them together. They act with a unity of purpose and with a difference of style.” 
 
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Read Fortune's profile of Bill and Melinda Gates <a href="http://fortune.com/longform/bill-melinda-gates-worlds-greatest-leaders">here</a>.

Bill and Melinda Gates

Jacinda Ardern had already broken new ground as a pregnant woman—and then a new mother—leading a nation. And this year, the 38-year-old Prime Minister showed the world her fullness as a leader as she deftly, empathetically, and humbly navigated New Zealand through the worst terror attack in its history, after 50 were killed at two mosques in Christchurch in March. 
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Rallying people behind the theme “We are one,” she channeled the country’s—and Muslim community’s—grief as she opened speeches with Arabic greetings and quietly wore a head scarf. She set a standard for dignity in the face of violence by refusing to speak the attacker’s name. And she won near-unanimous support for a ban on semiautomatic weapons of the kind used in the attack. Future leaders can look to Ardern for a master class in how to guide a country through a crisis.

Jacinda Ardern

Few people on either side of the partisan divide seem satisfied with the outcome of Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. But that very dissatisfaction speaks to the nobly impartial example the former FBI director set as he led an arduous, sensitive investigation. He and his team didn’t uncover the smoking guns that President Trump’s critics craved, nor did they grant the President the exoneration he demanded. Instead, sticking to the evidence and tuning out the hype, they exposed serious wrongdoing and shed light on systemic flaws that the nation is now more likely to address. 
 
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Mueller took on a thankless task with dignity, integrity, a willingness to sacrifice his own reputation for a cause, and an unflinching commitment to the rule of law. He proved the country’s institutions still work, even in the face of unprecedented political turmoil. That’s unquestionably good for the country, whatever the next act of the drama may be.

Robert Mueller

Compared with others in China’s boisterous tech scene, Ma keeps a low profile. But his influence has gone global thanks to WeChat, Tencent’s billion-member instant messaging service. WeChat is the epitome of the super-app model, a single interface through which users can pay bills, order food, book tickets, play games, and more. And rivals, including Facebook, are now adapting to emulate its success.

Pony Ma

Under Nadella, Microsoft has generated incredible growth from new businesses like its Azure cloud platform. And Nadella recently showed that he could put principles first while navigating employee unrest, as he stood by a contract to supply the U.S. Army with augmented reality headsets. He argued that Microsoft shouldn’t withhold technology from institutions that protect our democracy.

Satya Nadella

Greta Thunberg isn’t here to inspire you; she’s here to give you anxiety. “I don’t want your hope,” the 16-year-old climate activist said in a speech at the World Economic Forum this year. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.” 
 
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In September, she started skipping school on Fridays so she could protest government inaction on climate change at Sweden’s Parliament in Stockholm. Her one-woman sit-in ballooned into some 1,700 “climate strikes,” largely by youth, on March 15, under her “Fridays for Future” banner. The mass protest garnered the support of leaders from New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern to Paris Mayor Anne Hildalgo—and earned her a Nobel Peace Prize nod. Climate change, left unchecked, will cause wars, conflict, and refugee crises, said Freddy André Ovstegard, a Norwegian lawmaker who nominated her, so Thunberg’s movement is “a major contribution to peace.”

Greta Thunberg

At a time when U.S. lawmakers are divided over reining in Big Tech, Vestager has shown how it can be done. She "Apple-converted-space" fined Google a total of $9 billion for alleged anticompetitive behavior, sought $15 billion in back taxes from Apple (both moves are being appealed), and is investigating Facebook. Dismissive of industry excuses, Vestager says: “If it’s your algorithm, it’s your responsibility.”

Margrethe Vestager

South Sudan has lost five years and an estimated 383,000 souls to civil war, and the challenges of speaking truth to power at Nimiriano’s newspaper range from gas shortages to death threats. When security forces hauled a colleague to jail and told her to shut down the paper, she persuaded them to release him and let her publish. The battles will surely continue.

Anna Nimiriano

In March, chef José Andrés descended on Manhattan to prepare for the launch of a fresh addition to his restaurant empire—a 35,000-square-foot Spanish food hall in the sparkling new Hudson Yards complex. Here, alongside other A-list chefs such as the French Laundry’s Thomas Keller and Momofuku’s David Chang, Andrés’s New York City culinary concept would ply patrons with cured meats and cheese, tapas and paella, and a selection of a dozen sherries. 
 
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Read the full feature <a href="http://fortune.com/longform/jose-andres-worlds-greatest-leaders/">here</a>.

José Andrés

Health care costs in the U.S. have reached astronomical levels—spending hit $3.7 trillion in 2018—and they continue to climb, weighing on patients and the employers who help foot the bill. As America’s largest employer, Walmart is all too familiar with these trend lines—which have led McMillon and Woods to innovate to do health care better. 
 
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For the company’s 1.1 million U.S. employees and their families, Woods launched the Centers of Excellence (COE) program in 2013, enabling workers to travel to top hospitals Walmart contracts with for select procedures. The company foots the bill and has found it’s worth it. More than half the employees referred by their local doctor to get spine surgery, for example, have learned from a COE that they don’t need it. For those who do, an operation at a COE decreases the chance of readmission by 95%. Walmart has found that ­employees treated at a COE recover faster, too, returning to work three weeks earlier. 
 
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Walmart has now expanded the COE model to almost a dozen types of care. It’s a blueprint that others have started to emulate and one that might shake up the nation’s dysfunctional health care system.

Doug McMillon and Lisa Woods

Dangote is Africa’s richest person—worth $16.4 billion, according to Bloomberg—and the four publicly traded companies under the umbrella of his Dangote Industries now account for about a third of the value of the Nigerian stock exchange. That wealth is based on a big bet on Nigeria’s economic independence: Dangote’s peers give him credit for helping the country become self-sufficient in the sectors in which his companies compete (cement, agriculture, mining, and petroleum). 
 
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He’s now converting his wealth into impactful philanthropy: Dangote’s foundation, the largest in Africa, has helped establish a top-tier business school at Nigeria’s Bayero University; it’s also teaming up with the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation to fight chronic malnutrition in Nigeria.

Aliko Dangote

Son has become a tech kingmaker. He upended venture capitalism in 2016 by launching the $100 billion Vision Fund, and his backing often proves ­pivotal in battles between rival startups. Son personally vets CEOs of potential portfolio companies and spurs them to scale up dramatically, even if profit is elusive. Ride sharing as we know it might not exist without his avid backing of Uber, Grab, and Didi Chuxing.

Masayoshi Son

Health care costs are inflated in part by ignorance: The employers who pay the bills often can’t get medical providers to explain and justify what they charge. Bartlett helped save Montana’s state health plan from bankruptcy by demanding transparency from hospitals and doctors, then negotiating better deals. Other employers are now clamoring to follow her lead.

Marilyn Bartlett

Last year Apple became the first U.S. company to be worth $1 trillion, thanks to the dominance of the iPhone; it lost that status because iPhone sales growth is slowing, and Apple needs a new act. Cook knows it, too, and Apple’s “pivot” to services and subscription revenue, unveiled in March, is his bid to reignite growth. Succeed or fail, the reimagining will determine Cook’s legacy—and Apple’s future.

Tim Cook

Dobles helped her husband, Carlos Alvarado, win election in 2018 with a pledge to “decarbonize” Costa Rica by 2050. An architect and urban planner, she’s now in charge of turning that promise into reality—setting deadlines, brokering alliances, and raising money. Job one: replacing the antiquated buses and trains that anchor the nation’s transit system with clean electric models.

Claudia Dobles

When Bergh took over in 2011, the denim maker was a shadow of its iconic former self. Bergh brought the cool back, marketing Levi’s as hip Americana with a celebrity pedigree. Internally, he revamped company tech and cleaned house; by the time the company went public in March, annual revenue had risen 26% on his watch. Bergh has also launched the Safer Tomorrow Fund, a pioneering effort to prevent gun violence.

Chip Bergh

The youngest head coach in modern NFL history took his team to the Super Bowl, and although he didn’t win, much of the rest of the league wants a carbon copy of the 33-year-old. McVay’s up-tempo offensive style turned the Rams into a nearly unstoppable force and has triggered a youth movement: Of the eight head coach openings in 2019, four were filled by people under age 40.

Sean McVay

In the run-up to last year’s midterm elections, pundits chewed through hours of cable news programming, speculating about a potential blue wave. But while they were right about the oceanic force, they got the shade wrong—it was pink. Forty-two women won their congressional seat for the first time in 2018, the largest total since the 27 elected in 1992, the first “Year of the Woman.” 
 
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Read more about the Pink Wave <a href="http://fortune.com/2019/04/18/pink-wave-women-leadership-aoc/">here</a>.

The Pink Wave

A common theme links Code2040, a nonprofit that nurtures black and Latinx tech talent, and the eponymous beauty company that Walker launched in 2013. Both engage with the premise that people of color will be the majority in the U.S. in about 20 years (the “2040” in Code2040) and that businesses will miss huge opportunities if they fail to connect with that majority. 
 
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Walker, a Stanford B-school grad whose career includes stints on Wall Street and at Twitter, has made that case resonate in very disparate industries. Code2040 now places more than 100 “fellows” each year at Silicon Valley giants like LinkedIn and Airbnb. And in retail, Walker &amp; Co. broke through by persuading Target and Sephora to carry its shaving products and shampoos and display them prominently, rather than in an “ethnic beauty” niche. In December, Procter &amp; Gamble bought the company in another affirmation of Walker’s vision.

Tristan Walker

Baker’s approval ratings routinely land near 70%, a remarkable feat for a Republican leading a famously liberal state. He’s earned that favor with a quiet bipartisanship that feels almost foreign these days. A data-driven fixer—he previously led the turnaround of a health insurer—Baker has been effective in addressing the state’s opioid woes and issues with social services; he also signed a green energy bill last year.

Charlie Baker

About 24% of the U.S. workforce is 55 or above—and older workers face a disproportionate risk of being laid off. This spring, Jenkins rallied bipartisan support behind a long-­dormant bill that would strengthen federal age discrimination laws. She’s also a dogged critic of prescription drug costs—a burden to which older workers and retirees alike are keenly vulnerable.

Jo Ann Jenkins

Parkinson’s disease typically affects people when they’re around 60 years old. For star actor Michael J. Fox, it hit at 29. Fox was diagnosed in 1991 but didn’t publicly reveal his disease until seven years later. That decision was fueled in part by a desire to raise awareness about Parkinson’s and fund research to fight the degenerative disorder of the nervous system. Two decades later, Fox has become one of the most respected advocates in medicine. 
 
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His Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, founded in 2000, has raised and invested some $900 million in the quest for a cure. Fox carries a deep belief that Parkinson’s patients themselves must play a central role in curing the malady. “We’re the experts on what we have,” he said in a recent Fortune interview. “We have a responsibility as patients—if we expect [medical researchers] to do what we need them to do, they need to be fully informed on our experience, what works with us, what we respond to, what we can contribute.”

Michael J. Fox

As CEO of personal styling service Stitch Fix, Lake has quietly changed the game for women in corporate America. In 2017, at 34, she became the youngest female founder ever to take a company public. Stitch Fix’s board and workforce are majority female. And Lake last year set a trailblazing example by taking a substantial parental leave—16 weeks—while serving as a public-company CEO.

Katrina Lake

“Green” architecture arguably went mainstream thanks to McDonough, whose firms designed eco-friendly campuses for such giants as Nike and Ford. Today he’s a leading proponent of a “circular economy” in which sustainability drives all product design; he’s steering an effort to redesign plastics using materials that won’t pile up in our oceans and bloodstreams.

William McDonough

Ireland’s youngest ever Taoiseach—and first openly gay and first ethnic-minority leader—stands out on all fronts. But it’s how he has positioned Ireland to win big in Brexit that’s most noteworthy. Varadkar’s commitment to low taxes and low-drama politics has wooed the likes of Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Barclays to move their European bases to Dublin while securing Ireland’s title as Europe’s fastest-growing economy.

Leo Varadkar

Health workers often struggle for access to essential generic drugs, thwarted by price hikes, shortages, and drug-industry whims. Enter Harrison, CEO of a top Utah health system, with a bold fix: With six partners, he formed an independent nonprofit drugmaker, Civica Rx. The venture has signed up some 800 health systems as customers; it should be producing generics by year’s end.

Marc Harrison

In 2016, a glass ceiling was broken in the world’s most popular sport when Senegal’s Fatma Samoura was named the first female secretary general of FIFA, soccer’s world-governing body. Samoura, a veteran of the United Nations, was brought on board to help haul FIFA out of a corruption scandal that resulted in dozens of indictments and guilty pleas for wire fraud, racketeering, and money laundering. 
 
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On her watch, FIFA has taken financial oversight responsibility back from its hitherto unreliable member organizations. The proportion of women within FIFA’s administration has risen to 48% from 32% in 2016. She’s helping women gain on the field too: Three years ago, FIFA established its first-ever women’s soccer division; it more recently launched its first global strategy for realizing the commercial potential of the women’s game.

Fatma Samoura

For decades, Kyaw Hla Aung has tirelessly resisted violent discrimination against his Rohingya people in Myanmar. His efforts to open schools for Muslims and to protest seizures of farmland have earned the lawyer global respect, along with prison time. Awarded the 2018 Aurora Prize for humanitarianism, he donated his $1 million prize money to fund health care for the 700,000 Rohingya displaced by recent ethnic cleansing.

Kyaw Hla Aung

Barber sees such issues as poverty, racism, and voter suppression as moral matters, with unethical treatment of people as their common theme. His “Moral Monday” protests at North Carolina’s State House have drawn thousands of marchers in recent years. Last year he revived the Poor People’s Campaign, originally launched by Martin Luther King Jr., to take his message nationwide.

William J. Barber II

Growing up in Guyana, Mohabir saw firsthand how the lack of access to large markets can trap small farmers in poverty. After stints at Deloitte and Harvard Business School, he returned to Guyana to organize farmers into a collective that could sell in bulk, then helped them find customers among industrialized-world food companies. Next up: teaching that business model in other small, farming-dependent countries.

Kapil Mohabir

It’s easy to mistake Fast Retailing’s Uniqlo unit for “fast fashion”: Its clothes, after all, are cheap and ubiquitous. But the trendy, disposable nature of fast fashion is the opposite of what Yanai aims for. Uniqlo’s warehouse-style shops are stocked with durable, practical clothes that work in any season, an approach that has positioned it as a leader in sustainable fashion.

Tadashi Yanai

Just because something is unreasonable doesn’t make it impossible. That’s the message Mick Ebeling and Daniel Epstein, two unconventional entrepreneurs, delivered to a captivated crowd at Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference in April. Ebeling’s Not Impossible Labs has developed technology that extends abilities to the impaired, including wearables that let deaf and hearing people alike feel music in a “surround body” experience, and a 3D-printing lab for prosthetics in Sudan. 
 
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Unreasonable, meanwhile, devotes itself to supporting and funding growth-stage entrepreneurs (rather than seed- and early-stage) to help speed those kinds of revolutionary ideas to market. Epstein cites George Bernard Shaw, who wrote that “all progress depends on the unreasonable man,” as an inspiration for his business philosophy. The group has invested time and resources in some 180 unreasonable entrepreneurs to date.

Mick Ebeling and Daniel Epstein

It may be tech’s biggest gender gap: Fewer than 10% of leadership roles in venture capital are held by women, and only 2.2% of VC funding went to female-founded companies in 2018. All Raise, a coalition of women in the VC field, launched last year (sparked by a group email from Cowboy Ventures partner Aileen Lee) with the aim of boosting both those numbers. All Raise gives female founders intensive one-on-one mentoring, while its VC Champions program pairs promising investors with senior partners at established venture firms. 
 
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Geographical diversity is another hurdle in tech: Steve Case (below, center), the AOL founder turned investor, says 75% of venture funding goes to firms in California, New York, or Massachusetts. With his partner, author J.D. Vance, Case runs Rise of the Rest, a $150 million fund devoted to companies in less heavily saturated markets. Through a process that includes buzzy bus tours and pitch competitions, Rise of the Rest has invested in about 100 companies in more than 30 states so far—reminding the startup world that a San Francisco Bay view is not a prerequisite 
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Venture Capital for the 99%

The economic potential of artificial intelligence captivates business leaders. But the so-called deep-learning systems behind A.I. are only as good as the data they are trained on. Imagine a scenario in which self-driving cars fail to recognize people of color as people—and are thus more likely to hit them—because their computers were trained on data sets of photos where such people were absent or underrepresented. 
 
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No one has done more than computer scientist Joy Buolamwini to draw attention to A.I. bias. In one widely read study, Buolamwini showed how facial-recognition technology from Microsoft, IBM, and China’s Megvii performed better when analyzing photos of lighter-skinned men than of darker-skinned women. Both Microsoft and IBM subsequently updated their tech. Her study of Amazon’s facial-scanning has been more controversial (Amazon has disputed her approach), but the friction underscores her influence as the conscience of the A.I. revolution.

Joy Buolamwini

Planeta Oceano aims to educate entire communities, from preschoolers up to business owners, about marine ecology, in hopes that they’ll take the initiative to protect endangered species. “It’s not top-down; it’s about acting together,” Forsberg says. 
 
The approach has helped protect sea turtles, rays, and sharks in Ecuador and Forsberg’s native Peru; she’s now bringing a digital curriculum to U.S. schools.

Kerstin Forsberg

In Nepal, some 15,000 girls a year are kidnapped and trafficked into sex work, often in neighboring India. In 1992, when she was 14, Danuwar became one of them. Rescued after four years in a brothel, she banded with other survivors to found Shakti Samuha (“Group of Power,” in Hindi). The organization provides shelter and counseling to trafficking victims and has helped more than 20,000 women.

Sunita Danuwar

As many governments slide toward autocracy and nationalism, Canada has been loud and clear in its call for liberal democracy and the rule-based international order. The main source of its full-throated defense is Freeland, Canada’s fierce, hardworking minister of foreign affairs. A journalist turned politician, Freeland has been outspoken in promoting human rights; she was key to Canada’s passing legislation in 2017 that allows for sanctions against bad actors. (The government has since leveled them against individuals in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Myanmar, and Sudan.) 
 
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Her tough negotiating skills were instrumental in securing Canada’s first-ever trade agreement with the EU, and last year, in hammering out the “new NAFTA” with the U.S. and Mexico. She won over U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, her negotiating rival, who told the Washington Post he considers Freeland “a good friend,” and added, “She did an amazing job for Canada.”

Chrystia Freeland

Agler is leading an international effort to eliminate a problem that shouldn’t exist: neglected tropical disease (NTD). Her organization has taken aim at five debilitating and sometimes fatal afflictions—including river blindness and intestinal worms—that are fully preventable and treatable but still affect more than 1.5 billion people worldwide. NTD is a bit of a misnomer, Agler notes. It’s not the diseases that are neglected, but the people who suffer from them. 
 
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The End Fund works with NGOs, governments, and private philanthropists to direct resources and coordinate their efforts. This approach has worked wonders: Between 2012 and 2018, it resulted in more than 724 million treatments and the training of 1.8 million health workers. 
 
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In April, the End Fund received more than $50 million from donors as part of the Audacious Project, a philanthropic initiative that backs organizations tackling the world’s most pressing problems. The money will help accelerate the elimination of intestinal worms in four African countries. That will give vulnerable populations, who miss out on school, work, and other life events when they suffer from worms, a chance to thrive. 
 
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Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of countries involved in the End Fund's intestinal-worm elimination project.

Ellen Agler

Peele continued his emergence as a director of heady horror with Us, which shattered the domestic box office record for original horror movies with a $70 million opening weekend in March. Peele is also helping filmmakers from all backgrounds get past Hollywood gatekeepers. Peele’s production company, Monkeypaw, accepted open script submissions this year, a rare move for an enterprise as hot as his.

Jordan Peele

Three blocks from the McAllen bus station sits Sister Norma Pimentel’s Humanitarian Respite Center. Here, the “Mother Teresa of South Texas” gives migrant families a chance to catch their breath, along with a shower, meal, change of clothes, and travel assistance. Motivated by faith, not politics, the center has helped more than 100,000 people since 2014.

Sister Norma Pimentel

In 2011, eight months after becoming CEO, Horta-Osório stepped away to seek help for stress. Today he’s giving his colleagues tools to help themselves while openly talking about his own crisis (and deftly navigating Brexit). Lloyds provides senior staff with mindfulness tools and psychological analysis so they can better process anxiety; it will soon roll out similar help for all employees. 
 
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Read the full feature <a href="http://fortune.com/2019/04/18/mental-health-less-taboo-at-work/">here</a>.

António Horta-Osório

There are platforms—and then there is the audience available to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Their May 2018 wedding, for example, garnered nearly 50 million television viewers in the U.K. and U.S. alone. The couple may project picture-perfect personas, but they use the global stage to promote causes that might be considered taboo even in non-royal households. 
 
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Harry has spoken out about struggles with mental illness, prompting overdue discourse about how the condition plagues men, who are less likely to seek help for it. Meghan, having brought new diversity of ethnicity and economic class to the House of Windsor, has taken up women’s empowerment as a signature issue, even declaring herself a “proud” feminist in her official royal biography.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle

Ford’s visibility soared last summer when <a href="http://fortune.com/most-powerful-women/beth-ford-30/">her promotion to CEO</a> made her the first openly gay woman to run a Fortune 500 company. Since then, she’s been an exemplar for bringing your whole self to work, serving as an LGBTQ role model without making that identity the focus of her leadership. And she has deftly steered the dairy cooperative during a year roiled by trade wars and changing consumer tastes.

Beth Ford

Crow has spent 17 years reinventing “party school” ASU as a higher-ed innovator, adding satellite campuses, online degrees, and partnerships to educate Starbucks employees and Uber drivers. Enrollment, at 98,000, is nearly twice that of 2002, and the student body is far more economically and racially diverse. Expansion hasn’t hurt learning: 52% of students graduate in four years, up from 28% in 2002.

Michael Crow

The hero of the Oscar-winning documentary short Period. End of Sentence invented a machine that turns cellulose into low-cost sanitary napkins­—a boon in India, where brand-name pads are prohibitively pricey. Each machine converts roughly 3,000 women to pad usage—and the freedom of movement that comes with it—and provides jobs for 10 more women.

Arunachalam Muruganantham

Fortune’s reigning <a href="http://fortune.com/2018/11/15/progressive-insurance-ceo-tricia-griffith/">Businessperson of the Year</a>, Griffith leads by example, drawing from the experience of having risen from entry-level claims adjuster to CEO over 30 years at Progressive. In her first C-suite gig, as head of human resources, she launched Progressive’s first diversity and inclusion programs. 
 
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As CEO, she grabs lunch with rank-and-file employees in the company cafeteria every Friday to help break down communication barriers and spread cohesion across the ranks. She excels at fostering creativity, sponsoring innovative hackathons and problem-solving workshops that spur heads-up thinking. Her moves have made Progressive a rare fast grower in a competitive, commoditized industry: Revenue has increased 36% since Griffith took the helm in 2016, thanks in part to a bet on A.I. and a bold leap into home insurance.

Tricia Griffith

At 93, Mahathir is writing an unexpected chapter in his legacy. During his first, 22-year tenure as Prime Minister, from 1981 to 2003, he turned Malaysia into one of Southeast Asia’s economic tigers, but his ornery disregard for the judiciary and the press hinted at autocratic leanings. Last year, he returned from seclusion to run for office on an anti-corruption platform, leading a new political party to a shocking victory over incumbent Najib Razak. 
 
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Mahathir is now tackling the endemic corruption plaguing the country’s institutions, and has brought Najib to court on charges connected to the 1MDB scandal, a sprawling malfeasance case that has ensnared Wall Street bankers and government officials (Najib denies the charges). Mahathir and his party are now moving to protect judicial independence and press freedom, recognizing that they help keep a democracy honest.

Mahathir Mohamad

Last spring, the Virginia men’s basketball team suffered one of the most shocking upsets in sports—becoming the first top-seeded team in the history of NCAA’s “March Madness” tournament to lose to a lowest-ranked 16 seed. This April, in the same tournament, Virginia won its first title. 
 
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That the Cavaliers ascended from humiliation to celebration is a testament to Bennett’s coaching skills. Inheriting a program that attracts relatively few stars, Bennett built a contender by stressing passing and disciplined, stifling defense. And after last year’s defeat, Bennett gave his players leeway to talk openly about the frustration of losing, the better to motivate themselves and one another. Discussing last year’s loss after this year’s triumph, he told reporters: “It bought us a ticket here.”

Tony Bennett

Austin boasts the third-lowest rate of violent crime among the 30 biggest U.S. metro areas, and many credit Manley for keeping the peace. He has made community collaboration a central focus, urging officers to forge ties with homeless people and with Austin’s Latin American immigrant communities. And he earned widening acclaim last year by keeping the city calm during a terrifying string of bombings.

Brian Manley

In his final week at the FDA, Gottlieb issued at least eight official statements, ­running the gamut from addressing the youth e-cigarette epidemic to developing rules for using A.I. in medical devices. That flurry of activity is a microcosm of his tenure—one defined by a willingness to thrust the FDA into any important fray­—and helped explain the unique impact of his short-lived term at the agency.

Scott Gottlieb

In business, government, philanthropy, and the arts, and all over the globe, these men and women are transforming the world and inspiring others to do the same. 