Items15The creator’s order
  1. 1Sam WaltonSam WaltonBorn 29 Mar 1918Walton handed the chief executive's job to David Glass in 1988, four years before his death, while staying on as chairman to back him publicly. Glass had been running operations and the distribution system for years, so the handover kept the people who knew the machine in charge. Walmart's sales…0i
  2. 2Ingvar KampradIngvar KampradBorn 30 Mar 1926Kamprad stepped down as IKEA's chief executive in 1986 but spent the next thirty years designing a succession that would outlast him: a web of foundations and holding companies that keep the business from being sold or broken up, and professional managers such as Anders Dahlvig running it. His sons…0i
  3. 3Herb KelleherHerb KelleherKelleher stepped back as Southwest's chief executive in 2001 and split his role between Colleen Barrett, his long-time right hand who became president, and the lawyer Jim Parker as chief executive, while he stayed chairman. Both had decades inside the airline and understood its low-cost,…0i
  4. 4Kjeld Kirk KristiansenKjeld Kirk KristiansenBorn 27 Dec 1947The founder's grandson recognised in 2004 that Lego was in crisis and that he was not the person to fix it, and handed day-to-day control to Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, a 35-year-old former consultant, while the family kept ownership through its holding company. It is an unusual case of a family owner…0i
  5. 5Anne M. MulcahyAnne M. MulcahyBorn 21 Oct 1952Having rescued Xerox, Mulcahy spent years preparing Ursula Burns to follow her, making her president in 2007 and giving her the operational lead well before the 2009 handover. It was the first time one woman succeeded another as chief executive of a large American company, but the more useful point…0
  6. 6Ursula BurnsUrsula BurnsBurns joined Xerox as a summer engineering intern in 1980 and worked her way up through product engineering and an executive assistant's role to the top. As chief executive from 2009 she bought Affiliated Computer Services to move Xerox into business services and later split the company in two.…0i
  7. 7Indra NooyiIndra NooyiBorn 28 Oct 1955Nooyi was PepsiCo's strategy chief before becoming chief executive in 2006, succeeding Steve Reinemund in a planned handover. Twelve years later she handed over to Ramon Laguarta, an insider who had run the European and global operations, with a clear timetable and a few months as chair. PepsiCo's…0i
  8. 8Tim CookTim CookBorn 1 Nov 1960Cook is on this list twice over. He succeeded Steve Jobs in 2011, after running the company during Jobs's medical leaves, and Apple's revenue and value grew many times over on his watch through services, wearables and supply-chain discipline. Then, after what the board called a long-term succession…0i
  9. 9Satya NadellaSatya NadellaBorn 19 Aug 1967Nadella was a 22-year Microsoft insider running the cloud and server business when he succeeded Steve Ballmer in 2014, after a search that considered outsiders. He moved the company from defending Windows to building Azure cloud services, made Office available on rival platforms and changed an…0i
  10. 10Sundar PichaiSundar PichaiBorn 10 Jun 1972Larry Page and Sergey Brin handed Google to Pichai in stages: chief executive of Google in 2015 when Alphabet was created, then of Alphabet itself in 2019, after he had run Chrome, Android and the core products. The staged approach let him prove himself before the founders stepped back. Revenue and…0i