Arielle | @_ArielleHope

Chief Executive Officer, it has a nice ring to it doesn’t it? As we begin 2013, we wanted to take a look back at the top CEOs of 2012. CEO’s aren’t the coffee drinking, shoes on their desks, money hungry monsters that most might picture when the title CEO comes up. CEO’s define their company or brand. They are the ones that we see when we think of Apple, Google, or Disney.

The longer the CEO’s are involved with their company, the more credibility they rake in. Forbes has compiled a list of the best CEO’s out there right now, by looking at over 200 CEOs and formulating their pay, along with their performance with their colleagues over a six-year span, and their return for tenure.

So here’s the list:

1. Jeff Bezos- Amazon
2. Marc Benioff- Salesforce.com
3. Bob Sasser- Dollar Tree
4. Neal Patterson- Cerner
5. Leonard Bell – Alexion Pharmaceutical

These may be the best out there, but recent news has also highlighted the new trend in female CEOs. There is now a record of 20 female CEOS operating the largest companies in America. IBM, Wal-Mart, Yahoo!, and HP are just some of the big companies that have announced this year their new female chiefs- some having appointed for the very first time a woman as CEO.

Rounding out the top women CEOs this year are:

1. Beth E. Mooney- KeyCorp
2. Ursula Burns- Xerox
3. Carol Meyrowitz- TJX Companies
4. Ellen Kullman- DuPont
5. Irene Rosenfeld- Kraft
6. Angela Braly- WellPoint
7. Indra Nooyi- PepsiCo
8. Patricia Woertz- Archer Daniels Midland
9. Virginia ‘Ginni’ Rometty- IBM
10.  Meg Whitman- Hewlett-Packard

The top companies in America are run by the brightest, and most dedicated. With the standards of today’s job field boosting and women gaining momentum among the top tier companies in the country I’m sure we’ll see an even more impressive list as we move forward in the coming years. And let’s face it, social media has done a lot in getting these names recognized by younger audiences. Without Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube younger generations would care less about business and what’s going on in the business world today. So if you’ve ever thought of running a major corporation, you might want to google a few of these men and women.