THE most influential living management guru is Michael E. Porter, head of
Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness,
according to the rankings of last The Thinkers 50 in 2005.
The Thinkers 50 ranking is based on the votes of 1,200 business people,
consultants, academics, MBA students and visitors to the project’s website.
Nonetheless, Professor Porter only just made it to the top. Had the ranking
been compiled a few weeks earlier, the title would have gone to Peter
Drucker for the third successive year. But the father of modern management
died on November 11 at the age of 95.
Professor Porter’s ascension is no surprise. After the new economy meltdown,
strategy is fashionable again. More of a surprise is a massive surge of
support for Bill Gates. Once regarded as the business equivalent of a James
Bond villain, Gates’s elevation to the No 2 slot suggests that he has
successfully reinvented himself through a judicious combination of vacating
the Microsoft hot-seat and billion-dollar philanthropic giving.
Also benefiting from a generosity of spirit is another strategy guru,
Professor C. K. Prahalad, of the University of Michigan, whose book The
Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid challenges conventional thinking
about the world’s poor. He rises an impressive nine places to No 3.
Professor Prahalad is one of several Indian-born management gurus to make
the 2005 ranking. These include the CEO coach Ram Charan (ranked 24),
Professor Vijay Govindarajan, of Tuck Business School (30), and Harvard’s
rising star Professor Rakesh Khurana (33). As yet no Chinese guru has
emerged.
Business gurudom is a man’s world, with only four women in the top 50.
Insead’s Professor Renée Mauborgne is the highest placed at 15, followed by
Harvard’s Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter at 19, Dr Lynda Gratton, of the
London Business School (34), and the No Logo author Naomi Klein (46). The
anti-management message of Dilbert rises from 27th to 12th place in the
guise of the cartoonist Scott Adams. However, despite a strong showing early
on, there is no place in this year’s ranking for the ultimate management
fashion victim David Brent.
Thinking time
VOTING for this year’s Thinkers 50 resulted in a shortlist of 80 gurus.
A Google search established the number of references for each before they were
assessed against criteria including originality and practicality of ideas,
presentation style, research rigour and impact. The research was done by
Suntop Media in association with the European Foundation for Management
Development.
www.thinkers50.com
Page 2: The top 50 business brains ()
The top 50 business brains
1 Michael Porter (2)* Harvard strategy specialist
2 Bill Gates (20) Founder of Microsoft
3 C. K. Prahalad (12) LBS strategy man
4 Tom Peters (3) Leadership consultant
5 Jack Welch (8) GE’s ex-CEO and celebrity
6 Jim Collins (10) Author of Good to Great
7 Philip Kotler (6) Kellogg’s marketing guru
8 Henry Mintzberg (7) Promotes Managers not MBAs
9 Kjell Nordstrom & Jonas Ridderstrale (21) Funky
Business exponents
10 Charles Handy (5) British portfolio worker
11 Richard Branson (34) Entrepreneur and Virgin flyer
12 Scott Adams (27) creator of Dilbert
13 Thomas Stewart (37) Intellectual Capital author
14 Gary Hamel (4) Strategy consultant
15 Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne (31) Blue Ocean
Strategy duo
16 Kenichi Ohmae (19) Japanese strategy master
17 Patrick Dixon (46) Futurist and change guru
18 Stephen Covey (16) Knows The 7 Habits of Highly Effective
People
19 Rosabeth Moss Kanter (9) Harvard’s change manager
20 Edward De Bono (35) Lateral thinker and author
21 Clayton Christensen (22) Harvard’s new-tech guru
22 Robert Kaplan & David Norton (15) Balanced scorecard
creators
23 Peter Senge (14) Learning organisation inventor
24 Ram Charan (-) Coach to the CEOs
25 Fons Trompenaars (50) Intercultural management man
26 Russ Ackoff (-) Specialist of systems thinking
27 Warren Bennis (13) Humanist leadership guru
28 Chris Argyris (18) Action and learning guru
29 Michael Dell (33) Dell Computer’s founder
30 Vijay Govindarajan (-) Tuck’s strategy innovator
31 Malcolm Gladwell (-) Blink and Tipping Point guru
32 Manfred Kets De Vries (43) Psychoanalytic economist
33 Rakesh Khurana (-) Harvard labour market guru
34 Lynda Gratton (41) LBS people and strategy guru
35 Alan Greenspan (42) Head of US Federal Reserve
36 Edgar Schein (17) MIT organisational psychologist
37 Ricardo Semler (36) Radical CEO of Semco
38 Don Peppers (48) Customer relationship man
39 Paul Krugman (40) Economist and columnist
40 Jeff Bezos (39) Amazon’s main man
41 Andy Grove (26) One of the Intel founders
42 Daniel Goleman (29) Emotional intelligence inventor
43 Leif Edvinsson (-) Professor of intellectual capital
44 James Champy (25) Advocate of re-engineering
45 Rob Goffee & Gareth Jones (-) Authentic leaders
46 Naomi Klein (30) No Logo author
47 Geert Hofstede (47) Cultural expert
48 Larry Bossidy (-) Chair of Honeywell
49 Costas Markides (-) LBS strategy professor
50 Geoffrey Moore (38) Hi-tech marketing man
* 2003 ranking in brackets
Page 3: Michael E. Porter ()
Michael E. Porter
MICHAEL E. PORTER is the Bishop William Laurence University Professor at
Harvard Business School. With 18 books and a host of influential articles to
his name, his status in the world of management thinking is legendary. As
well as teaching and writing, he consults widely with the Monitor Group, the
consulting firm he helped to establish.
Professor Porter is an educator but he is not a performer or management
superstar in the conventional guru sense. One magazine observed that he was
as likely to write a bestselling management blockbuster as give a lecture
wearing a bra and stockings. Few of his books are available in paperback.
He has advised the public and private sectors world wide and has received
civic medals usually reserved for military heroes or extraordinary
sportspeople. The son of an army officer, he was born in 1947 in Ann Arbor,
Michigan. He studied mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton and
then switched to business, gaining an MBA and PhD in economics from Harvard.
A talented golfer and all-round sportsman, Professor Porter has always been
obsessed by competition. His first widely-read book, Competitive Strategy,
is now in its 63rd imprint. In it he analyses competition, introducing his
Five Forces framework, still essential reading for MBA students. He
subsequently moved from competition between firms to competition between
nations. In The Competitive Advantage of Nations he examines why
some countries are wealthy and others not. His study of national economies
is extensive, though not always welcome. In Can Japan Compete? he
showed that the long recession suffered by Japan was the inevitable result
of successive postwar Japanese governments’ policies. In 2003 he produced a
report for the DTI on the UK’s competitive position — examining ways to
tackle the productivity gap in the UK. He also established the Initiative
for a Competitive Inner City in the mid-Nineties.
