Items12The creator’s order
  1. 1Roy O. DisneyRoy O. DisneyBorn 24 Jun 1893Walt Disney was the face and the creative force; his older brother Roy found the money. Roy co-founded the studio in 1923, kept it solvent through near-bankruptcies, arranged the loans that paid for Snow White and the financing for Disneyland, and after Walt's death in 1966 delayed his own…0i
  2. 2Takeo FujisawaTakeo FujisawaBorn 10 Nov 1910Soichiro Honda built the engines; Fujisawa, who joined in 1949, ran everything else. He raised the capital, built the national network of bicycle shops that sold Honda's first motorised bikes, pushed for the Super Cub and set up the American sales operation. He and Honda retired together in 1973,…0
  3. 3Taiichi OhnoTaiichi OhnoBorn 29 Feb 1912Ohno was a Toyota production engineer, not a chief executive, and from the late 1940s to the 1970s he developed most of what became the Toyota Production System on the factory floor: just-in-time supply using kanban cards, stopping the line to fix problems, and relentless cutting of waste. It…0i
  4. 4Henry Earl SingletonHenry Earl SingletonSingleton co-founded the conglomerate Teledyne in 1960 and avoided publicity, rarely speaking to analysts or the press. His distinctive work was capital allocation: issuing shares when they were expensive to buy companies, then buying back huge amounts of stock in the 1970s and 1980s when it was…0
  5. 5Mike MarkkulaMike MarkkulaBorn 11 Feb 1942Markkula had retired from Intel's marketing department in his early thirties when he met Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976. He put in about 250,000 dollars as equity and loans, wrote the first business plan, recruited Mike Scott as the first professional chief executive and set out principles on…0
  6. 6Charlie MungerCharlie MungerBorn 1 Jan 1924Munger was vice-chairman to Buffett's chairman for over four decades and nearly always the second voice. Buffett credited him with the single most important shift in Berkshire's approach: from buying fair businesses at bargain prices to buying wonderful businesses at fair prices, starting with…0i
  7. 7Colleen BarrettColleen BarrettBorn 14 Sept 1944Barrett started as Herb Kelleher's legal secretary and became Southwest Airlines' president, the person who built and protected its customer-service and employee culture while Kelleher was the public face. She handled staff relations, set up the culture committee and personally answered customer…0i
  8. 8Ajit JainAjit JainJain joined Berkshire Hathaway in 1986 with no insurance background and built its reinsurance business into a source of tens of billions of dollars of float, the money Berkshire invests. He priced unusual risks, from huge catastrophe covers to sporting events, with discipline about walking away…0
  9. 9Tim CookTim CookBorn 1 Nov 1960Before Cook became Apple's chief executive he spent thirteen years as the operations chief Jobs hired in 1998, closing Apple's own factories and warehouses, moving manufacturing to contract partners in Asia, and cutting inventory from months to days. That supply chain is why Apple could launch the…0i
  10. 10Jeff Williams (Apple)Jeff Williams (Apple)Williams joined Apple from IBM in 1998 and spent most of the next two decades running procurement and operations, then from 2015 served as chief operating officer. He negotiated the flash memory deals that let Apple build the iPod nano and iPhone at scale and later oversaw the Apple Watch and…0