Honestly? Steve Jobs.

Most giant corporations today are run by money men. (It's tough to become a giant corporation without having the money men in charge.) The only problem with that is, to become an effective money man in the modern world, you've gotta pretty much devote yourself 24/7 to finance issues and salesmanship.

Apple is the anomaly -- they managed to choose a leader who wasn't a true money man. Jobs certainly had the cutthroat mentality to be one, but his true passion was always for design, not money. So where most giant companies will perform endless surveys and attempt to create products that the general population want, Apple ended up concentrating only on devices that Steve Jobs wanted. And, oddly enough, it survived long enough to actually produce a few of those devices.

As such, it was able to ignore trends, fads, criticism, and even basic logic and common sense in order to create a very small collection of very well-designed products. And so, the iPod with its five buttons was leaps and bounds ahead of any other MP3 player. The iPhone pretty much revolutionized the "smart phone" industry. And the iPad more or less created the modern tablet market segment all by itself.

That kind of innovation in design -- led directly from the top of the company -- is all too rare. Big companies will frequently experiment with radical concepts; Nokia's Internet Tablet series is a perfect example of this. But no true money man will bet the entire company on an unproven device; the risk/reward payoff just isn't worth it.

And you can see that today. Honestly, Android is more of a response to the iPhone than an innovative product in its own right. Nokia dropped Meego and went to bed with Microsoft because Microsoft appeared to be the less risky strategy. Everyone is reacting to the choices Apple has made; that's the way a money man works, by going to where the money is today, not by trying to create the world of tomorrow.

Without Jobs at the helm, I don't see Apple performing nearly as well in the future. Which is sad, because it probably means the return of the money men to power, and therefore more mediocre products. I've never agreed with Jobs' sense of design myself, but at least he had the guts to try something new. I just don't see that kind of corporate leadership anywhere else today...