That Certain Something: Influential Entrepreneurs
We put the question to six experts: Who are the five most interesting entrepreneurs of the past 30 years?
Tom Peters
Author of 15 books, including In Search of Excellence
She built an enormous public-service organization from the ground up. She's a hell of a lot more entrepreneurial than 70 percent of people I lived around in Silicon Valley.
Taddy Blecher
CIDA City Campus
Suddenly, out of nowhere, he left the world of consulting and started a free thousand-person university for underprivileged students in South Africa.
The women recipients of microloans from Grameen Bank
The men who borrow from Grameen usually squander the proceeds. But the women have turned the process of borrowing and investing money into a larger effort of community development.
Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Dubai
Dubai is going through a rough patch, but President Obama would love to have the sheik as an employee. He could get people building the next day.
Larry Janesky
Basement Systems
I love the notion that you can have a fabulous business based on cleaning mold out of basements. Larry has a saying, "You don't have to love what you do; you have to do what other people hate." He executes like a champ.
Carl Schramm
President and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Robert Swanson and Herbert Boyer
Genentech
Swanson, a young venture capitalist, and Boyer, a recognized scientific genius at the University of California, San Francisco, joined forces in 1976. Genentech was truly a union of commerce and science that spawned the commercial watershed that we now call the biotech sector.
Herb Kelleher
Southwest Airlines
Kelleher's focus on delivering a superior customer experience was a genuine innovation.
The business plan Smith wrote for FedEx is as good as it gets. His insights into the art of logistics have had an impact on countless companies.
Bob Johnson
BET
Johnson launched Black Entertainment Television in January 1980. Eleven years later, BET became the first black-controlled company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Gary Burrell and Min Kao
Garmin
Like so many business pioneers before them, Burrell and Kao recognized a market opportunity before anyone else did. Garmin adapted military technology to create an entirely new consumer-electronics product segment: GPS.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Professor of business administration at Harvard Business School
Winfrey has built a billion-dollar, multi-faceted enterprise around her personal brand -- and done it with integrity. We used to have entrepreneurs who created companies and then later did things for the world with their wealth. But Winfrey has used her platform to inspire other people, from Day One.
Steve Jobs
Apple
He helped to create one whole industry with the idea of a personal computer and a whole other industry with the iPod.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Google
They figured out how to mix their culture with professional management. That's the story behind the huge global brand.
Wendy Kopp
Teach for America
You can't talk about entrepreneurship in the past 30 years without talking about the major phenomenon of social entrepreneurs like Kopp.
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