This is about influence, not corporate or statutory power, celebrity, social status, or wealth. These are the people who significantly influence the way we live in the Twin Cities.

Edited by William Swanson. With Melissa Colgan, Katie Derdoski, Erin Gulden, Sarah Howard, Steve Marsh, Adam Platt, Abby Van Ness, and Megan Wiley.

The men and women on the following pages are people in our towns who get things done. They build, shape, or otherwise affect the institutions where we work and do business; the places where we eat, listen to music, watch baseball, and worship; the political candidates we vote for (or not); the education our kids receive; even the quality of the air we breathe. In large if sometimes invisible ways, they significantly influence the way we live in the Twin Cities.

This is about influence, not corporate or statutory power, celebrity, social status, or wealth—though there’s no question that influence often derives from one or more of those attributes. In any case, not every big shot in town is influential to the extent that these folks are. By our definition, influence means providing a spark or a push, creating a perception, driving a trend, seeding a venture, and/or setting the example that gets the rest of us riled up, writing checks, and through the door. Time was when such a list would comprise a dozen rich white men, period. Today it’s much more diffuse, diverse (though not diverse enough), and technologically enabled in a way that was unthinkable a generation ago. Such a list, today, could run to exhausting lengths. We’ve capped it at about 100 and present it in alphabetical order below.

First, a couple of caveats:
Our focus, with few exceptions, is on local impact, which pretty much rules out the brilliant scientists at the University of Minnesota and commercial labs around town, and sundry other visionaries, innovators, artists, and humanitarians whose influence is truly global or, at any rate, more potent in, say, China or East Africa than in Minnesota.

If you’re a member of Congress or the city council, hold a judgeship, or head a company that employs thousands of Minnesotans, you enjoy, ex officio, some influence. The handful of elected officials and CEOs we’ve included wield, in our opinion, more influence than most of their local peers.

Such lists are highly subjective. There are many perons who could have been included—and probably would have been if you had compiled this list. But our judgement rules here and we're sticking to it, though we'll welcome your comments and additions at edit@mspmag.com
—W.S.