What Makes a Great CEO?

[caption id="attachment_2048" align="alignleft" width="194" caption="WalMart CEO & President Mike Duke"][/caption]

They are the the top dogs in a business, the head-honchos, the innovators, the pioneers and the ones that make the tough decisions. Running a business is like coaching a sports team, in that every player must be working together for a greater goal. For sports, that's finding a way to win. In business, it's finding a way to stay successful. Forbes Magazine released an article interviewing the most innovative CEOs of today. Some, we haven't heard of, and some we have, but what all of these CEOs have in common is that their business is thriving, and they are working to keep it that way.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com

“My job is to guide Salesforce. I can’t sit in headquarters and pretend I’m in touch. Odds are, what we’re using today will be obsolete in a few years. The past is never the ­future. But it’s easy to get caught up in the continuum.”

Nitin Paranjpe, Hundustan Lever

"Typically, in an entrepreneur, ambition outstrips resources and that inequality forces the entrepreneur to think differently. We've learned to innovate by raising our ambitions and constraining our resources."

Victor Fernandes, Natura Cosmeticos, S.A.

Victor Fernandes is the director of science and technology concepts in innovation for Brazil's largest direct-sales cosmetics maker. "We do not innovate around products, but around a flow or well-being experiences...Our department of innovation is made up of almost 300 people here in Brazil...biologists, pharmacists, engineers, sociologists, psychologists..We launch more than 100 new products a year."

Robert Kotick, Activision Blizzard

"The most important thing we do to encourage innovation is give people the freedom to fail...We really spend a lot of time upfront with our audiences...to really try and draw out from that what it is they would like to play...And if we disappoint their expectation, I think we are a very good learning organization, really digging deep into understanding why it didn't work."

Read more at Forbes