Global leaders of tomorrow: meet 12 executives in Europe, Asia and Latin America who are reshaping global commerce.

A new generation of business leaders are asserting their capabilities and determination around the world. They comprise the post-millennial vanguard forging our global economy.

Complementing and supplanting the European-dominated hierarchies of the post-World War II era, they include Asian and Latino leaders. Taking advantage of leaps in technology and the homogenization of culture, they are borderless. They may be entrepreneurs, ambitious scions of established family enterprises or executives of multinational corporations, but they're all enabled by the spread of free-market capitalism. Many are making their mark in high-tech and emerging sectors, while others are blazing new trails in traditional staples of industry. They tend to be young, with universal sensibilities. Despite the increasing redistribution of American business might to the rest of the world, many have important ties to the U.S.

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It would be impossible to put together any kind of objective list of these new leaders. Even empirical measures such as net worth--if they could be known--prove simplistic, because energy, ideas and potential are the most important currencies in this arena.

Yet Chief Executive has identified a dozen individuals from around the world who clearly exemplify the new generation, their backgrounds, their attitudes--and their possibilities.

Alberto Arebalos

Google

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Representing one of the world's most dominant and dynamic new brands should be a piece of sopaipilla for Arebalos after dodging death threats as a journalist. But the 45-year-old director of communications and public affairs for Google in Latin America has the crucial task of serving as the face of Google in one of its fastest-growing markets.

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Arebalos has mettle on his CV. As a Reuters reporter, the Buenos Aires native specialized in danger, covering the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia and the messy rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. By 1997, he was its youngest regional editor, based in Miami. Cisco recruited him in 2000 to head Latin American public affairs.

He jumped to Google last fall, where one of his most challenging tasks is to help open up a corporate culture that has tended toward the secretive--even though its success is built on the Internet. Google "is built on goodwill, and we could lose it in a moment," Arabalos says. "This is a company that touches practically everyone's life nearly every day."

Arebalos looks up to John Chambers, CEO of Cisco. "He's an excellent leader." When he's not traveling, he tinkers with new devices to enhance his hobbies of listening to music and watching movies.

Shouvik Bhattacharya

Adea

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At 38, Adea CEO Bhattacharya has already crisscrossed the world in executive and top IT consulting posts. Now he is making Adea a rapidly growing force in the accelerating global IT-consulting industry, with revenues of $75 million and a staff of more than 1,000 landing and fulfilling contracts on three continents.

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The Bangladesh native leapt onto the fast track at Tata, the highly successful India-based conglomerate. Then he took advantage of a U.S. fellowship and joined McKinsey, then Booz Allen. Adea, a Dallas-based company started by an Indian entrepreneur, was a burgeoning client, but then crumpled a few years ago after losing its primary customer. Fresh from a Sloan Fellowship at MIT, Bhattacharya accepted the Adea board's invitation to become CEO.

Bhattacharya has put Adea on an upward trajectory by courting former clients, recruiting new ones in retailing and health care, and opening an office in China. "Our kind of services are becoming important to mid-market companies all over," he says, "so that's where we're penetrating--and that's behind our growth."

Bhattacharya's U.S. ties include a Nebraska-born physician wife. So he often surprises American business colleagues with his knowledge of college football, his cowboy hat and guitar, and performances of Garth Brooks songs.

Constantino de Oliveira

GOL Linhas Aereas Inteligentes

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Son of a bustransport magnate, de Oliveira (who goes by "Junior") is the billionaire Freddie Laker of Brazil. In 2001, he launched low-cost GOL Linhas Aereas Inteligentes ("Intelligent Airlines") as its CEO and leapfrogged it past veterans such as American and Iberiato to the nation's No. 2 carrier. About 10 percent of its passengers are flying for the first time, using a new key link to the continent's economic centers.

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After dropping out of college to help manage the family company, de Oliveira saw an opportunity to convert Brazil's heavy long-haul bus traffic into budget airline passengers. So he purchased fuel-efficient, next-generation Boeing aircraft; pioneered a system for Internet ticketing that has become the airline's operational linchpin; and motivated his workforce with one of the country's first profit-sharing plans.

The Sao Paulo-based company went public in 2004, providing de Oliveira with more capital for expansion. South American destinations have expanded to 60. Last year, GOL Linhas Aereas Inteligentes acquired and integrated venerable Varig (VRG Linhas Aereas). Varig recently added five European destinations and planned to launch flights to New York and Miami this year.

Perhaps as a function of growing up with three brothers, the 39-year-old de Oliveira says he's "a man of few words. I prefer to hear a lot and to lead people, converging our energies on the same point."

Michael Hoffmann

Hewlett-Packard

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At 46, Hoffman is an HP lifer, but that doesn't mean he takes his job or his company for granted. In fact, the dedication he demonstrated to corporate goals and values since joining HP out of college 20 years ago helped Hoffman climb the ranks to the unique position he enjoys today as the company's only senior vice president not based in the U.S.

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The supplies, image and printing operation Hoffmann runs is crucial to growth because he's in charge of the high-margin products that keep HP's millions of installed printers churning out billions of pages worldwide.

A member of the fifth generation of merchant families on both sides, Hoffmann leveraged his sales acumen and dedication to HP into a career-long blitz through many corporate functions and locations. "Now, I'm thinking about how markets are developing three to 10 years out and driving the right decisions around technology, research and development, our manufacturing footprint, and workforce development," he says. "But I also need to make sure our current execution is flawless."

Hoffmann lives in Munich because his family is well settled there, though it means more travel for him. Between flights and dinners at home, he trains for two or three triathlons each year.

Jacob Hsu

Symbio

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Early in his career, it became clear to Hsu that his birth in Taipei and childhood in the U.S. gave him a global perspective helpful to businesses. Now, the 33-year-old CEO of Symbio heads the largest software-outsourcing concern in China focusing on Western technology clients. Using reasonably priced engineering talent in second- and third-tier Chinese cities is one of his savvy moves.

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"We've been very successful because we understand how China works," says Hsu, whose Beijing-based company has reached about $50 million in sales and plans an IPO early next year. "Our bridge between East and West is our core competitive advantage."

Hsu joined Symbio in Silicon Valley in 1998, when the startup was becoming an early outsourcer of software development to China, for blue-chip clients including Microsoft and IBM. He ran U.S. operations, then started a financial-services division in Tokyo in 2000. Symbio's China business boomed after China clamped down on IP pirates and got approval to join the World Trade Organization. Now global headquarters are in Beijing, and Symbio has 800 people on the mainland.

Hsu co-hosts a weekly game of Texas Hold 'Em for Western CEOs and Chinese venture capitalists. The latter "haven't quite gotten the bluffing thing down yet," he says.

Laurent Kocher

Orange Business Services

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Senior vice president of global services, Kocher joined this B2B unit of the France Telecom Group three years ago with an eye toward helping transform the enterprise into not only the dominant business-network provider on its home continent but also a player in the North American market. Under his rising star, Orange Business Services became the premier provider to multinationals in Europe and Asia and is now competing against AT & T on its home turf.

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Kocher, 42, was always intrigued by technology, and began his career selling IBM hardware and software in Europe. Orange recruited him with the promise that he could help create the business market's "shift toward the communications space--enabling people, machines and systems to communicate at any time, from anywhere," as he puts it.

Double-digit annual growth ensued, and much of Kocher's task now is to acquire and integrate other operations into his Orange unit--including three French companies and one in India during the last two years alone.

"Integrating service companies is quite a challenge," he concedes. "But if you set the right vision, and people can recognize themselves in the ambition, you can get people on board."