Silicon Valley's most powerful imagination belongs to a very powerful CEO.
That's according to recent data from job search firm Paysa, which used IBM's supercomputer Watson to determine that Apple CEO Tim Cook is the tech industry's "most imaginative" leader. Cook is followed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Oracle's Larry Ellison and Cisco's Chuck Robbins.
It's clear why "having or showing creativity or inventiveness" would be important for tech titans. After all, they're tasked with leading employees to innovate new products and come up with solutions to problems that may not even exist yet.
And it's a fitting title for Cook, given his close work with the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs over the years. A growth strategy expert recently told CNBC that Apple's success comes from Jobs' penchant for innovation and his imaginative thinking, and Cook has demonstrated his own prowess since taking over as CEO in 2011. He's overseen the company as it's developed a slew of new products, including as driverless cars.
Here's the full list of the 11 most imaginative tech leaders, according to Paysa:
Paysa performed a similar analysis of the most assertive leaders in the tech industry, and Nadella, Gates and Zuckerberg all scored top marks for that characteristic as well.
To arrive at these results, Paysa fed "speeches, essays, books, the transcripts of interviews and other forms of communication produced by those highlighted above"— over 2,500 words — through the Watson Personality Insights API.
"Personality Insights extracts personality characteristics based on how a person writes," according to IBM Watson's website. "You can use the service to match individuals to other individuals, opportunities, and products, or tailor their experience with personalized messaging and recommendations."
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