 No. 27 Sam Palmisano, CEO, IBM
Last year's position: 7
Despite dropping 20 slots since last year, Sam Palmisano continues to prove a worthy successor to Lou Gerstner, the man who remade IBM for the 21st century and in whose shadow Palmisano may always live.
Yet the IBM chief continues to make his own waves in the industry, capturing market share from HP in both servers and services and beating out Oracle at its own game, databases. It's been a good year financially too, with revenues growing for the first time since 2000.
But more than anything Palmisano earns the title of Agenda Setter this year for coming up with a consistent message and strategy for all of Big Blue's many businesses - and for how his competitors (HP, Oracle and even EDS and CSC) are now repeating that very same story.
"IBM's at the top of its tree," one panellist said, and Palmisano is the one perched on the very highest branch.
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