If you’re hungry for some inspirational leadership, then spend some quality time with Fortune’s World’s Greatest Leaders list, which is up this morning.
This year’s list is a testament to a new dynamic in business and power, which my colleague Geoff Colvin calls “unbundling.”
“Unbundling means disaggregating enterprises of all kinds, from the smallest startups to entire nations,” he says. “In business it can mean making a company more valuable by splitting it up, as Hewlett-Packard did and other companies (Honeywell, Pentair, DowDuPont) are doing. Or it can mean increasing value by delegating functions once regarded as necessary parts of the whole.”
This is why kids are at the top of our list —the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the other student/activists who have begun shaping the narrative on gun policy in a way never seen before. Yes, they used technology to message and mobilize with exceptional effectiveness, but the unbundling model of leadership also means re-thinking how power is defined, how people become leaders and how organizations form and grow.
In a similar vein, #MeToo is No. 3 on this year’s list and the West Virginia teachers who organized on Facebook to challenge their own union for better working conditions and decent pay come in at No. 31.
Here’s the top ten:
- The Students Marjory Stoneman Douglas and other schools
- Bill and Melinda Gates Cofounders, Gates Foundation
- The #MeToo Movement
- Moon Jae-in President, South Korea
- Kenneth Frazier CEO, Merck
- Scott Gottlieb FDA commissioner
- Margarethe Vestager Commissioner for Competition, European Union
- Larry Fink CEO, BlackRock
- General Joseph Dunford Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
- Liu He Vice Premier, China
The great Val Valentina spent some time with Black Panther director Ryan Coogler (No. 17) who had some excellent advice for leaders who want to better understand new power dynamics on a daily basis: Keep your eyes open for opportunities to share credit when things go well and responsibility when things go wrong.
“It’s a business that requires a lot of creativity from a lot of people,” he said of the movie industry – and which is increasingly true across the board. “The worst thing you can do is take credit for stuff that somebody else did. It’s part of the deal as a director that you will get credit for other people’s creative choices, so you want to compensate for that as much as you can.”