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"I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies." --Napoleon Bonaparte

Power has been called many things. The ultimate aphrodisiac. An absolute corrupter. A mistress. A violin. But its true nature remains elusive. The Forbes list had to contend with a definition for 'powerful'.

To calculate the final rankings, five Forbes senior editors ranked all of the candidates in each of these four dimensions of power. Those individual rankings were averaged into a composite score, which determined who placed above (or below) whom.

U.S. President Barack Obama emerged, unanimously, as the world's most powerful person, and by a wide margin. But there were a number of surprises. Former President George W. Bush didn't come close to making the final cut, while his predecessor in the Oval Office, Bill Clinton, ranks 31st, ahead of a number of sitting heads of government. Apple's ( AAPL - news - people ) Steve Jobs easily made the list, while Arnold Schwarzenegger, the movie star governor of California (which alone has an economy larger than Canada's) did not.

MIND RICH

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