1. Тео Эпштейн - Президент по бейсбольным операциям клуба «Чикаго Кабс»

In the fall of 2016, as partisan distrust and division reached abysmal depths, fascination with the Chicago Cubs became that all-too-rare phenomenon that united America. As the Cubs fought to end a 108-year championship drought, television ratings for the World Series soared by almost 50%. Even casual fans who didn’t know a bunt from a beanball stayed up late to watch the excruciating extra-inning Game 7 that turned baseball’s most famous lovable losers into winners at last.

The Cubs owe their success to a five-year rebuilding program that featured a concatenation of different leadership styles. The team thrived under the affable patience of owner Tom Ricketts, and, later, under the innovative eccentricity of manager Joe Maddon. But most important of all was the evolution of the club’s president for baseball operations, Theo Epstein, the wunderkind executive who realized he would need to grow as a leader in order to replicate in Chicago the success he’d had with the Boston Red Sox.

In his book The Cubs Way, Sports Illustrated senior baseball writer Tom Verducci describes that evolution, showing how a deeper understanding of important human qualities among his players—the character, discipline and chemistry that turn skilled athletes into leaders—enabled Epstein to engineer one of the most remarkable turnarounds in sports.

6. Ава Дюверней - Американский режиссёр, сценарист, продюсер и публицист. В 1999 году она создала The DuVernay Agency

Less than a decade into her directing career, DuVernay became the first African-American woman to helm a film nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award (2014’s Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma). Her own Oscars snub in the directing category that year—and the zero Oscar nods for non-white actors in successive years—stirred up controversy over Hollywood’s lack of diversity.

A former publicist, DuVernay never shied away from the issue, tweeting to her 600,000-plus followers that “shame is a helluva motivator” after the Academy tweaked its membership rules to bring in more minority voters. She finally did receive her first Oscar nod this year (for 13th, the stirring documentary about race in America). Now, DuVernay is busy making history again as the first black woman to direct a movie with a $100 million budget: Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time adaptation. Her success continues to draw attention to Hollywood’s need for better representation of women and minorities both in front of, and behind, the camera.

8. Цай Инвэнь - Тайваньский политик, Президент Китайской Республики (Тайвань) с 20 мая 2016 года

Tsai captured headlines in December with a phone call to then-President-elect Trump, the first between U.S. and Taiwanese leaders since 1979. It was a bold move for Taiwan’s first female President, who’s steering a cautious path between the U.S. and ­China. Tsai is sympathetic to independence; when Beijing tried to punish Taiwan after her January 2016 election by restricting its citizens’ visits, she wooed Southeast Asian travelers to spark a tourism boom. She is also pushing economic reforms, including shortening the workweek to five days from six.

9. Джон Маккейн - Американский политик-республиканец, сенатор США от штата Аризона с 1987 года

It has been nearly three decades since the U.S. last elected a President who saw combat in the military. That helps explain the enduring bipartisan appeal of McCain, the former Navy pilot and prisoner of war who just earned his sixth Senate term. McCain has become one of the nation’s most trusted voices on defense by being both a backer of a strong military and a cautionary voice against ill-advised conflicts. As chair of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, he’s uniquely positioned to help a new administration define what safety means.

10. Ангела Меркель - Немецкий государственный и политический деятель. С 21 ноября 2005 года — федеральный канцлер Германии

12. Джон Кейсик (Касич) - Американский политик, представляющий Республиканскую партию. 69-й и ныне действующий губернатор штата Огайо

Kasich’s moderation didn’t resonate with Republican voters in last year’s presidential primaries. But as the leader of a politically consequential state, the Trump skeptic commands a key platform. Lately he has used it to rally GOP governors behind preserving the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which allowed him to secure coverage for nearly 700,000 Ohioans. Kasich made his case directly to Trump in February, and it made a difference: Instead of immediately zeroing out federal support, the GOP’s replacement plan would extend it until 2020.

17. Джанет Йеллен - Американский экономист, глава Федеральной резервной системы США с 3 февраля 2014 года (первая женщина на этом посту)

When the Fed began raising rates in late 2015, there was reason to fear a meltdown, especially given that a generation of investors had come of age without experiencing a rate hike. That markets stayed sane is a testament to Yellen, who has been calm and consistent in making sure Wall Street and the public know what to expect from the world’s most powerful central bank. Credit Yellen, too, for resisting populist pressure to raise rates earlier, when that could have hurt a fragile economy.

23. Joe Biden - Former U.S. Vice President

It wasn’t until the former Vice President lost his son Beau to cancer in 2015 that many people first came to appreciate Joe Biden as a leader. A childhood stutterer who was elected to the Senate at age 29 in 1972, then lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car crash just weeks later, the Delaware politician became a living example of perseverance that resonated with Americans across both sides of the aisle. He inspired further admiration when he responded to Beau’s death by taking up the White House’s “cancer moonshot” initiative, which, in its short tenure so far, has focused critical attention on breaking down barriers to research collaboration and data sharing. Biden’s personal mission to cure the disease will be the focus of his career after politics, and he’ll have public goodwill on his side: He left office with his Gallup approval rating at an all-time high of 61%.

Many CEOs call their employees associates; others call them partners. Zhang calls all 73,000 of them ­entrepreneurs—and actually means it. It’s one sign of how Zhang is changing his company, the world’s No. 1 appliance maker, and in the process reconceiving the large business organization more profoundly than anyone else on the planet.

He’s winning in part by expanding through acquisition; in 2016 he bought General Electric’s appliance business for $5.4 billion. More fundamentally, Zhang sees a future that most CEOs don’t. “Competitions in the Internet era are not between companies but between platforms,” he tells Fortune. At Haier, teams of people who may not be Haier employees come together for projects and then disperse. A product can also be a platform for multiple companies. One example: For a networked “smart” oven project, companies that might sell food via the device could pay to be partners, enabling Haier to reduce appliance prices.

Haier consists of some 3,000 company-funded entrepreneurial micro-enterprises that live or die by their individual success, plus a few hundred teams funded partly by outside investment. “If a startup team cannot attract any venture capital, they can either consider how to progress and strive harder or they will be dismissed,” Zhang explains.

So how do you turn thousands of corporate employees into entrepreneurs? Wrong question. “The task is not to turn Haier’s internal staff into entrepreneurs, but rather to attract all the entrepreneurs in society onto our platform,” Zhang says.

29. Светлана Ганнушкина - Российская правозащитница, педагог и общественный деятель. Председатель Комитета «Гражданское содействие», член Совета и руководитель Сети «Миграция и Право» правозащитного центра «Мемориал», а также (до июня 2012 года) член Совета при Президенте Российской Федерации по содействию развитию институтов гражданского общества и правам человека. В 2016 году — кандидат в депутаты Государственной Думы от партии «Яблоко»
Российская правозащитница, педагог и общественный деятель. Председатель Комитета «Гражданское содействие», член Совета и руководитель Сети «Миграция и Право» правозащитного центра «Мемориал», а также (до июня 2012 года) член Совета при Президенте Российской Федерации по содействию развитию институтов гражданского общества и правам человека. В 2016 году — кандидат в депутаты Государственной Думы от партии «Яблоко

In Putin’s Russia, fighting for human rights isn’t the safest career path. And yet Gannushkina, a 75-year-old mathematician, soldiers on. Her Civic Assistance Committee has helped over 50,000 people, mainly migrants and refugees, navigate Russia’s byzantine legal system. Some of her successes: Pushing to amend refugee laws to grant citizenship to millions, and lobbying for the rights of refugee children to attend Russian schools. All this, despite her organization being labeled a “foreign agent” by the Russian government.