Best business leader of 2009?

Barry Salzberg is chief executive of Deloitte. He also is a member of Deloitte's U.S. board of directors, the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu global executive committee and the DTT global board of directors.

Rather than single out a best business leader, I'd recognize the many unsung ethical heroes in our organizations. I'm talking about people who, even when no one is watching, consistently do the right thing. And they've been doing it at a time when confidence in business urgently needs to be restored.

The news on this front is better than you might expect. A recent survey by the Ethics Resource Center shows that, from 1994 to 2009, the percentage of U.S. employees who report themselves as under pressure to take ethical risks has declined from 28 percent to 8 percent -- a huge drop. I think that's in part a tribute to pressure from the workforce itself.

As anybody who hires knows, today's workers -- members of Gen Y especially -- expect to work for ethical organizations. In 2009, 62 percent of employees see their culture as being very or somewhat ethically strong, a 10-point rise since 2000. It's also worth noting that, in companies where employees see their culture as ethically strong, 91 percent of them feel that executive compensation is appropriate.

What's also remarkable is that, at a time when workers worry about anything that might jeopardize their jobs or careers, they still stick their neck out to address wrongdoing. The survey says the percentage of employees who witnessed misconduct fell seven points, from 56 percent in 2007, to 49 percent in 2009. But 63 percent of those who witnessed misconduct reported it, compared with 58 percent in 2007.

As we prepare our organizations for the upturn, we also need to prepare our people for the uptick in wrongdoing that can accompany better times. In the meantime, let's celebrate the true heroes of the Great Downturn -- the workers who, through the toughest of times, have hung tough on their core ethics and values. In a time of reckoning, they constitute a powerful force of hope.

Yash Gupta is dean of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.

Two leaders I would single out are FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, for her handling of the banking crisis, and Ford chief executive Alan Mulally, for steering his company through the problems besetting the auto industry. But, frankly, we haven't seen a lot of exemplary business leadership this year. It's much easier to come up with instances of failed leadership. Apparently the public agrees, given recent surveys showing a decrease in trust in the nation's CEOs.

President Obama has had some good moments of leadership this year, particularly in speeches. His Nobel address, for example, demonstrated leadership when he spoke the uncomfortable truth that sometimes war is necessary to stop the spread of evil. I also admired his speech in Cairo, in which he asserted that while the United States sees itself as a leader, it is also a committed partner in the community of nations.

Still, the president has made his share of missteps this year. He tried to own a job that wasn't his when he fired the chairman of General Motors. He failed to articulate the reasons for the urgency of health-care reform. He hasn't laid out a clear, definite strategy for taming the economic situation. To say he inherited the previous administration's mess isn't good enough. It comes across as making excuses, and that's not what leaders are supposed to do.

On the other side of the aisle, the Republicans showed a failure of leadership with their talk of "death panels" and other overheated language in their efforts to hinder health legislation. Even worse, they failed to offer constructive alternatives to the Democratic proposal. Their primary weapon was fear-mongering, which is no way to lead people to a better future.

Part of leadership is being able to anticipate trends. It bothers me when people say they couldn't have done any better because "this is the environment we're in." But we count on our leaders in all fields and all industries to understand the environment and have a sense of where it could be heading.

As part of the Coro Fellows Program in Public Affairs, Parsa Sobhani is one of 12 Southern California fellows engaged in a full-time, nine-month graduate-level leadership training program that prepares people for public affairs leadership.

It's easy to look at the bottom line of the world's top companies and evaluate "delivering results" as the greatest return on investment. But that would be too easy. Biz Stone and Evan Williams have created a communications revolution with Twitter. The project to date seems to baffle some in the business community, however, in its lack of monetizing.

Stone and Williams are leaders in their own right. They are morphing from start-up entrepreneurs to visionaries of a social media phenomenon, the marketing instrument for individuals and companies alike. And while their company still maintains a small San Francisco office, the staff, as well as its user population of an estimated 50 million, continue to grow. Twitter has been at the forefront of current events: the Iranian election, Obama's campaign, even the daily escapades of our favorite celebrities.

As leaders, Biz Stone and Evan Williams have been rewarded for an idea and demonstrate a back-to-basics attitude. They are creating a future in which events are an individual's outlet to inform, entertain and, soon enough, sell. Stone and Williams will push their vision to see that Twitter reaches 100 million users. In the meantime, their creativity and patient vision has pushed the paradigm for the traditional business model.