As demonstrated in the previous chapters, athletic leaders can be extremely successful in turbulent, government-dominated environments with rapid knowledge obsolescence – conditions that are met in contexts other than Russia. In search of non-Russian athletic leaders, we first took a look at the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). We tried to identify companies that had achieved world-beating status and examined whether their CEOs possessed the attributes of athletic leaders. We were especially interested in finding a woman CEO to test our hypothesis that, even though athletic leadership may seem quite masculine, it is independent of gender and can be successfully practiced by female executives.

What if athletic leadership could be effective in developed economies too? Rapid change and knowledge obsolescence, turbulence and heavy government interference need not be characteristics of the market as a whole but of a specific industry, such as technology. If you were asked to name the greatest business leader in this sector, you would probably say Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos – all of them from technology companies, all of them from one of the world's most developed markets (the United States), all of them quite different from the identikit portraits painted by the leadership literature and all of them bearing a striking resemblance to athletic leaders.

In this chapter, we focus on three athletic leaders from different parts of the world: Roger Agnelli, former CEO of Brazilian Vale; Dong Minzhu, CEO of Chinese Gree Electric; and Jeff Bezos, president, CEO and chairman of United States-based Amazon. All three not only exemplify the mindset of athletic leaders (mental toughness, adaptability, super-sized ambition etc.) but have also used the same metapractices in defining their company's path, obtaining new knowledge and dealing with followers, media and government.

Brazil: Roger Agnelli

A member of the BRICS, Brazil is one of the major emerging economies and the seventh largest in the world, with GDP of 3.2 trillion international dollars (PPP) in 2016.