In the defining years of American business, founding CEOs were virtually synonymous with the companies they led. Walt Disney was Disney incarnate; Dale Carnegie came to represent the steel industry itself. These figures were not just company leaders; they were the gravitational center around which entire industries revolved. Those days are gone. Though we still have echoes in modern chief executives like Tim Cook or Richard Branson, these figureheads, too, are becoming rarer.
At Fortune, we've spent almost a century studying what separates the good leaders from the great ones; the ones who don't just survive disruption, but shape it. The next wave of corporate chiefs is emerging from a radically different playbook. They're products of an economy defined by technological acceleration, and operate with fluency across disciplines that didn't even exist in the CEO vocabulary a decade ago: data science, AI governance, cybersecurity, social trust, geopolitical volatility, and shifting expectations of what leadership should look like.