The 2011 Top 50 Business Thinkers...

Do you have a favorite management guru? Someone that guides and shapes your thinking in an area such as leadership, business or corporate strategy, or my favorite - innovation. Interestingly, when CEOs like Jeff Bezos name their favorite books, they'll often cite authors like Jim Collins, who wrote the business school classic, Good To Great, Malcolm Gladwell, and Michael Porter, known as the father of modern corporate strategy. If, like me, you have ever wondered who the most influential and respected business thinkers are then your wait is over...

I just came across a definitive global ranking of management thinkers that is published every two years based on voting at the Thinkers50 website and input from a team of advisers led by Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove. The Thinkers50 has ten established criteria by which thinkers are evaluated: originality of ideas; practicality of ideas; presentation style; written communication; loyalty of followers; business sense; international outlook; rigor of research; impact of ideas and the elusive guru factor. Not surprisingly, 2011's winner is Clayton Christensen of "disruptive innovation" fame. The 2009 winner was the late C. K. Prahalad, who co-authored a favorite book of mine "The New Age of Innovation" with M. S. Krishnan.  

Here's the link to the website:

http://www.thinkers50.com/results/2011

I have reproduced the listing* below with yellow highlights on the business thinkers that I actively follow.

Ranking        Name (Previous Yr. Ranking)

1                     Clayton Christensen (28)

2                     W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne (5)

3                     Vijay Govindarajan (24)

4                     Jim Collins (17)

5                     Michael Porter (11)

6                     Roger Martin (32)

7                     Marshall Goldsmith (14)

8                     Marcus Buckingham (25)

9                     Don Tapscott (39)

10                   Malcolm Gladwell (2)

11                   Sylvia Ann Hewlett (-)

12                   Lynda Gratton (18)

13                   Nitin Nohria (-)

14                   Robert Kaplan & David Norton (37)

15                   Gary Hamel (10)

16                   Linda Hill (-)

17                   Seth Godin (-)

18                   Teresa Amabile (-)

19                   Rita McGrath (-)

20                   Richard Rumelt (-)

21                   Richard D'Aveni (26)

22                   Jeffrey Pfeffer (-)

23                   David Ulrich (31)

24                   Tom Peters (19)

25                   Rosabeth Moss Kanter (27)

26                   Nirmalya Kumar (-)

27                   Pankaj Ghemawat (-)

28                   Herminia Ibarra (-)

29                   Daniel Pink (-)

30                   Henry Mintzberg (33)

31                   Costas Markides (47)

32                   Thomas Friedman (30)

33                   Tammy Erickson (46)

34                   John Kotter (41)

35                   Amy Edmondson (-)

36                   Kjell Nordström & Jonas Ridderstråle (23)

37                   Howard Gardner (16)

38                   Henry Chesbrough (-)

39                   Daniel Goleman (34)

40                   Vineet Nayar (-)

41                   Rakesh Khurana (44)

42                   Fons Trompenaars (-)

43                   Ken Robinson (-)

44                   Andrew Kakabadse (-)

45                   Stewart Friedman (-)

46                   Adrian Slywotzky (-)

47                   Stephen Covey (29)

48                   Sheena Iyengar (-)

49                   Umair Haque (-)

50                   Subir Chowdhury (-)

*Source: The Thinkers50