Leadership isn’t inherited. It isn’t appointed. It’s earned in the quiet moments when everyone else looks away—when the path forward is unclear, the odds are stacked, and the easiest choice is to maintain the status quo. Real leaders don’t just navigate uncertainty. They create certainty where none existed before.
This edition of Global Leader of the Year 2025 – CXO Leadership celebrates exactly that kind of courage. It profiles leaders who refused to accept the world as it was handed to them. Who saw broken systems and built better ones. Who understood that leadership is measured not in titles or corner offices, but in the lives transformed by their decisions.
Our cover story takes you into an unexpected corner of healthcare—one that most people never think about until they’re lying in a hospital bed. Dr. Mohammad Fouad Al-Ibrahim has spent 16 years proving that healthcare catering isn’t about feeding patients; it’s about healing them. In Saudi Arabia, he’s turned meals into medicine, operations into orchestras of precision, and food service into a form of dignity. His work reminds us that true innovation often lives in the margins we’ve trained ourselves to ignore. The question he answers isn’t “How do we feed patients better?” It’s “How does every meal become an act of care?” That shift in perspective—from transaction to transformation—defines what leadership looks like when it’s done right.
Beyond our cover, this edition brings you the journeys of leaders who’ve rewritten the rules in their sectors. Henrik Henriksson walked away from the CEO chair at one of Europe’s most successful companies to decarbonize an industry everyone said was impossible to change. Jamie Dimon built a financial fortress in the years when everyone else was building houses of cards, then steered it through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression without flinching. These are blueprints—strategic, surgical, and deeply human.
We’ve also examined how three visionaries built something even more powerful than products: they built platforms. Jensen Huang, Andy Jassy, and Brian Chesky didn’t just create companies—they created ecosystems where millions of others could build value. Our case study unpacks the platform playbook that turned chips, cloud, and hospitality into winner-take-most markets. The insight? The leaders who dominate tomorrow aren’t selling products. They’re building the infrastructure everyone else depends on.
What connects every story in this edition is a simple truth: leadership begins where comfort ends. It starts when you look at a problem everyone else has accepted and decide you won’t. When you invest in solutions that won’t pay off for a decade. When you choose the harder right over the easier wrong.
The leaders profiled here didn’t wait for permission. They didn’t wait for perfect conditions. They saw what needed building and built it. That’s not just leadership. That’s legacy.
This edition is your invitation to do the same.
