Apr 21, 2018

They're Not All Assholes





Good to remind myself once in a while that there are people in positions of power who get it - people who understand that this month's numbers mean diddly-shit if there's nothing left to work with in order to get next month's numbers. And that if you just leave it to the next guy to worry about that, then you're setting us all up for the kind of disaster we're starting to experience now.

Fortune Magazine's list of 50 great leaders for 2018:


16. Isabelle Kocher, CEO, Engie

In just two years, Kocher has pulled Engie, the energy giant formerly known as GDF Suez, into the future. The legacy oil and gas company now focuses on renewables and decarbonization; it has sold $15 billion worth of “dirty” assets and reinvested in cleaner ones. Kocher, the only woman CEO among France’s CAC 40 companies, recently boosted Engie’s dividend and reported its return to profitability after a two-year absence.



Eating your seed crop and fouling the nest are really bad ideas - even when you do it inadvertently, or for reasons you think are currently justifiable.



24. Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries

In less than two years, India’s richest man has brought mobile data to the masses—and completely upended the country’s telecom market. Since Ambani, chief of the $47 billion conglomerate Reliance Industries, launched Jio—the first mobile network in the world to be entirely IP-based—in September 2016, the company has signed up a staggering 168 million subscribers. The secret? Offering dirt-cheap data and free calls (and plowing billions of dollars into the infrastructure that transmits them). The effect, dubbed “Jio-fication,” has driven India’s higher-price carriers to drop costs (if not run them out of business), and it fueled a 1,100% rise in India’s monthly data


Combining a disrupting innovation with a socially conscientious plan for implementation is what we used to do here in USAmerica Inc - before we put the bean-counters in charge and started insisting we could smash-fit everything into a 12-column ledger.

25. Mick CornettFormer mayor, Oklahoma City

If you’re a fiscally conservative mayor in a fiscally conservative city, how do you persuade voters to pay more for public works? Cornett proposed tying new spending to small sales taxes—and requiring that the taxes expire once the projects were paid for. During his 14-year tenure, his so-called MAPS plans helped Oklahoma City pay for school revitalization, public transit, and downtown improvements. Cornett left office in April on a high note and is seeking the GOP nod for governor.


Pay-as-you-go without the punishing Calvinist bullshit, which is always just the thinly-disguised Kick-'Em-When-They're-Down approach that the GOP normally takes.

BTW - it has escaped no one's notice that Donald Trump is not on this list.

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