1.

Gary Becker, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on
Human Capital
2. Michael A. Cusumano, author of "Competing on Internet Time"
3. Peter Drucker, Widely recognized as the father of modern management. "Concept of the
Corporation"
4. Daniel Goleman, author of the best seller "Emotional Intelligence".
5. Gary Hamel, author of "Leading the Revolution"
6. Michael Hammer, co-author of "Reengineering the Corporation"
7. Charles Handy, author of The Age of Unreason and Age of Paradox.
8. Robert Kaplan, author of "The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action
(also with D. Norton)"
9. John Kotter, John P. Kotter on "What Leaders Really Do"
10. Philip Kotler, co-author of "Marketing Moves: A New Approach to Profits, Growth &
Renewal"
11. Kenichi Ohmae, author of "The Invisible Continent: 4 Strategic Imperatives of the New
Economy"
12. C. K. Prahalad, co-author of "Competing for the Future: Breakthrough Strategies for
Seizing Control of Your Industry and Creating the Markets of Tomorrow"
13. Michael E. Porter, author of "Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries
and Competitors"
14. Edgar Schein, inventor of the term "Corporate Culture"
15. Peter Senge, MIT professor and author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of
the Learning Organization

Honorable Mention

• Alvin Toffler, author of "Future Shock" and "The Third Wave"

• Tom Peters, author of "In Search of Excellence"
• Ken Blanchard, author of "One Minute Manager"
• Anthony Robbins, author of the "Personal Power" series
• Stephen Covey, author of "The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People"

Coimbatore Krishnao -- 2007 ranking: 1

CK -- Prahalad was born in the town of Coimbatore

in TamilNadu. He studied physics at the University
of Madras (now Chenai). He worked as a manager
in a branch of the Union Carbide battery company,
before continuing his education in the United
States, and earning a PhD from Harvard. He has
taught in India and America, eventually joining the
faculty of the University of Michigan's Business
School, where he holds the Harvey C Fruehauf
chair of Business Administration.

At Ann Arbor Prahalad met Gary Hamel, then a

young international business student. Their
collaboration ultimately resulted in the bestselling,
Competing for the Future (1994). In his recent book (written with Venkat Ramaswamy),
The Future of Competition (2004), Prahalad argues that companies have not made
enough use of the opportunities provided by globalisation. There is an inability to realise
that not only have the rules of the game changed but the role of the players has been
transformed too. The 'customer' is a more powerful and pro-active figure. Customers are
no longer abstractions that have to be satisfied. Thanks to the internet, they are agents
creating and participating in transactions. The concept of value has also changed. It is not
inherent in products or services. It can't be instilled by producers or providers. It has to be
co-created with consumers. They build this by experiencing it. The only way companies
can compete successfully is through building new strategic capital.

Alongside this work, Prahalad has been wrestling with the perplexingly complex and
political issue of poverty. This led him to write The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid
(2004) in which he identifies the world's poor (the 'bottom of the pyramid') as a potential
untapped market for companies, worth anything up to $13 trillion a year. "The real source
of market promise is not the wealthy few in the developing world, or even the emerging
middle-income consumers. It is the billions of aspiring poor who are joining the market
economy for the first time" he explains. A market at the bottom of the pyramid could be
co-created by multi-national and domestic industry, non-governmental organisations and,
most importantly, the poor themselves. They would then have choice over their lives and
the products they use. He points to Hindustan Lever's success in marketing soap-powder
and detergents in smaller, cheaper units. This created prosperity downstream through new
distribution mechanisms. Too often poor people are patronised, Prahalad wants them to
have real power in the marketplace.

Bill GATES
2007 ranking: 2

William Henry Gates III (b. 1955) was born in

Seattle. He won a place at Harvard but
dropped out, partly through lack of confidence
in his teachers. In 1976 his interest in
electronics propelled him to found with his
friend Paul Allen a company for writing
software for micro-electronic devices called
Microsoft. Their first product was a version of
the programming language BASIC for the
primitive Altair 8800, the first personal
computer in the world.

Five years later they licensed an operating

system MS DOS to IBM for use with that
company’s nascent personal computer. Gates
and Allen retained the right to use and develop the system themselves. Gates had a
mission, to put a personal computer (using Microsoft software and programming
languages) on every desk and in every home. IBM felt that the PC was at most a fad or a
toy. The personal computer market mushroomed throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and
with it grew the success of Microsoft.

Bill Gates likes to portray himself as something of a techno-prophet, but neither he nor
Microsoft have a sure Midas touch. He was at first dismissive of the Internet, seeing it as
a geek’s plaything. Once he realised his mistake he made a high-speed U-turn. The result
has included Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft’s operating system for networks and servers,
Microsoft NT, was an expensive flop, and not a few computer professionals see
Microsoft software as “bug-infested” and unreliable. Gates decided in 1998 to re-organise
the company under the banner of VV2 (Vision Version 2). It was split into eight
autonomous units. Gates himself, while remaining at the Microsoft helm, has taken less
of a hands-on approach in recent years. He devotes more of his time to work with the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s richest.

Bill Gates does not belong to any university faculty. He doesn’t consult or coach. Neither
does he lecture. He is not a hermit and his thoughts on management have been made
widely available, through his two books The Road Ahead (1995) and Business @ the
Speed of Thought (1999). His involvement with his company and with the industry as a
whole has always been transparent. People could see (some of) what he was doing at
Microsoft.

He has always had quite a lot to say about strategy. In the manner of management gurus
he has isolated six things that a company should do to achieve success in any market. It
should

1. Concentrate on a market with big potential and few competitors

2. Get in early and go in big
3. Set up a proprietary position
4. Protect that position using every method available
5. Aim for high gross margins or the highest available
6. Make customers an offer they find hard, if not impossible, to refuse

Microsoft is a knowledge company. Its assets are its highly-skilled and creative workers.
It is held together by a digital nervous system (DNS) of e-mail, allowing instant
connectivity. This also allowed a high degree of supervision to Gates when he was active.
He could supervise and comment upon even the smallest detail of the work of individual
employees.

Some visitors have likened Microsoft’s headquarters to a university campus. There are
lots of opportunities for brain-storming, sharing ideas and generally interacting in as
informal a way as possible.

Gates has always sought to inject the organisation with vital components. There are five,
all of which begin with the letter ‘E’:
- Enrichment - employees are attracted by high salaries and retained through generous
option schemes
- Egalitarianism
- Empowerment
- E-mail
- Emphasis on Performance – employees’ performances are assessed twice-yearly. They
receive a mark on a one-to-five scale. A ‘four’ is extraordinarily good: a ‘one’ means
they’re fired.

Bill Gates is not a management guru in the sense of others. He does not preach, except to
his own employees. He does not intimate that what works (or has worked) for Microsoft
can be translated into success elsewhere. But his very success inevitably means that what
he does at Microsoft is an object of study and emulation by others.

Michael PORTER
2007 ranking: 4

Michael E. Porter is the Bishop William Laurence

University Professor at the Harvard Business School. He
has an almost “living legend” status in the world of
management thinking. He has written eighteen books and
countless articles. In addition to his teaching he consults
widely with the Monitor Group which he helped
establish. Above and before everything he is an educator,
either by the spoken or by the written word. But he is not
a performer or management superstar. The Economist
once commented that he was as likely to write a best-
selling management blockbuster like … (the reader can
no doubt supply an example) as to give a lecture wearing
a bra and stockings (what an awful image!). Few of his
books are available in paperback. He has advised both the public and private sectors
throughout the world. Not only has he been showered with academic and business
awards, he has even received civic medals usually reserved for military heroes or
extraordinary sports people. Porter was for many years active in the US military’s reserve
and was a celebrated college footballer, baseballer and golfer in his youth.

Porter was born in a university town – Ann Arbor, Michigan. His father was an army
officer. He studied mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton and then switched
to business, earning an MBA and a PhD in economics from Harvard. He later joined the
faculty there.

Porter has always been obsessed by competition. His first widely-read book Competitive
Strategy (1980) is now in its 63rd imprint. In it he analyses competition. There is
 • natural competition and tension between existing players in an industry
• threats of new entrants to the market
• the prospect of substitute products or services
• the bargaining power of suppliers
• the bargaining power of consumers

There are three ways to compete effectively:

• produce a product or service either more cheaply,

• produce something that is better and different from the competition. He defined
the latter as “differentiation”.
• dominate a niche market and close out the competitors.

He did not believe many companies could do all three or even two at a time. The
particular strategy chosen depended on what type of company you had. He noted five:

• global
• fragmented
• emerging
• mature
• declining

The company also had to look at the series of links that went into its provision or
production. He called this The Value Chain (and the name has stuck). He isolated five
primary activities in any value chain.

• internal logistics -–getting the necessary materials

• production or provision
• external logistics and distribution;
• marketing
• after-sales services

These were each accompanied by a range of secondary activities. Each company’s value
chain in turn fitted into a wider value system.

Porter subsequently moved from competition between firms to competition between

nations. In The Competitive Advantage of Nations (1990) he examined how some states
were wealthy and why others were not. The important element here were National Value
Systems. He visualised these as akin to a four-sided diamond. The four components were:

• domestic rivalry – the tougher it was the better

• traditional economic resources
• infrastructure, including the education level of its citizens
• the cluster phenomenon.
The latter was very important, thought frequently overlooked. These were concentrations
of particular types of industry in defined geographical areas. They embraced the low-tech
Portuguese cork-makers and Silicon Valley. These areas can use economies of scale to
attract workers and increase efficiency, as well as cross-subsidization and skills pools..

His study of national economies has been extensive, though not always welcome. In Can
Japan Compete? (2000) he showed that the long and protracted recession suffered by
Japan was the inevitable result of successive post-war Japanese governments’ policies.

His most recent research on competition has involved a look at America’s inner cities. He
argues wealth creation is a sounder panacea for poverty and inequality reduction than
redistributing wealth from elsewhere.

He has academically colonised much of the east coast of the United States with various
centres supplied with full-time research staff working on a plethora of projects dear to his
academic heart, from competition to inner-city development.

Gary HAMEL
2007 ranking: 5

The opinionated, sometimes acerbic, voice of

contemporary strategy, Gary Hamel (b. 1954) is co-
author of Competing for the Future and, more recently,
Leading the Revolution (2000). Hamel looks set to match
Michael Porter's achievements, combining intellectual
vigor and empire building zeal. He lists his most
meaningful achievement as "finding a group of people
crazy enough and who care enough to start company
committed to upsizing rather than downsizing". Perhaps,
but Hamel also brings aphoristic energy to the turgid
world of management writing. Leading the Revolution
includes such bon mots as
"get off the treadmill of incrementation", "heretics not
prophets create revolutions" and "You can't use an old
map to find new land." Not Jane Austen.

Hamel is a visiting professor at Harvard Business School and London Business School.
California-based Hamel is also a consultant to major companies and chairman of
Strategos, a worldwide strategic consulting company. Strategos proclaims that it is
"dedicated to helping its clients get to the future first". It runs the Strategos Institute - a
"client-sponsored multi-disciplinary research program" - and the Strategos Practice - "a
partner not a consulting company". The selling point is the quality of the ideas and access
to big hitting intellectuals - its clients include Royal Dutch/Shell, Emerson Electric and
Nokia.

Hamel argues that complacency and cynicism are endemic. "Dilbert is the bestselling
business book of all time. It is cynical about management. Never has there been so much
cynicism," he laments. "What we need is not visionaries but activists. We need antidotes
to Dilbert."

Tom PETERS
2007 ranking: 7

Tom Peters (b. 1942) is a native of Baltimore. He studied

engineering at Cornell, before heading to the west coast to
get his MBA and PhD at Stanford. He saw active service in
the Vietnam War with the US Navy. In the mid 1970s he
joined McKinsey as a consultant, leaving in 1981 to set up
his own firm, now part of the Tom Peters Group.

In 1982 appeared In Search of Excellence (written with

Robert Waterman, a fellow McKinsey partner). This
became the best-selling management book of the twentieth
century - the first to reach the best-seller charts. This was
soon followed by the nearly as successful A Passion for
Excellence (1985).

The book has achieved a cult following. It tied in with the

need in the United States in the early 1980s to feel good about being American again. It
showed that significant parts of American industry and business were excellent; others
could be too. Its simplistic rhetoric earned Peters a wrap over the knuckles from the
venerable Peter Drucker. He chided Peters for making “managing sound so incredibly
easy. All you have to do is put that book under your pillow and it will get done.”

In Search of Excellence was an American classic. It contained really great stories of do-
and-dare about 43 excellent American companies. It was not long on theorising. It is
liberally spruced with nuggets of home-spun wisdom: “If a window of opportunity
appears, don’t pull down the shade.”

Jack WELCH
2007 ranking: 8
Jack Welch is the former CEO of General
Electric.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of a

bus conductor, he studied chemical
engineering at the university of Massachusetts,
gaining a PhD in the same subject from the
university of Illinois. He joined General
Electric’s plastics division in 1960. He
devoted the rest of his working life to the
company.

His rise was meteoric. At age 33 he became

one of the company’s youngest general
managers. He subsequently served as vice
president and sector executive for the consumer products and services sector and finally
he was vice chairman and executive officer. In December 1980, after a little over twenty
years in the company, he was named GE’s eighth CEO, the youngest in the company’s
history.

Welch had an immense impact on corporate America, setting standards of best practice
for its senior executives. He always led by example. He had shown during his rise to
greatness the potential of GE’s plastics divisions. He also laid the foundations for the
success of GE Capital. As CEO he took a number of innovative steps to promote the
disparate elements of what had become an unmanageable conglomerate. He announced to
the various sectors that unless they could become either the number 1 or the number 2 in
their respective industries they would be spun off. He commented: ‘My main job was
developing talent. I was a gardener providing water and other nourishment to our top 750
people. Of course, I had to pull out some weeds, too.’ His talent-nurturing sometimes
took unusual forms. He also introduced the practice of establishing “anti-groups” within
certain divisions whose role was to put forward the opposite to official policy in a
deliberate attempt to encourage debate and discourage group-thinking.

He earned a reputation for being endlessly creative, never being hide-bound by

convention when it came to solving a problem.

He introduced Six Sigma Quality Management at GE, after its usefulness had been shown
in Motorola. St Augustine asked God to make him perfect “but not yet”. He was an early
advocate of Six Sigma, a means of achieving near-perfection in manufacturing by
gradual, incremental steps, monitored by specially-trained experts called Black Belts and
Master Black Belts.

Welch also became known for his desire to communicate. He is reputed to have written
three to four thousand notes to members of his staff every year. GE’s financial success
came at the expense of extensive layoffs. During the process of streamlining the
company, over 100,000 workers lost their job. His perceived ruthlessness earned him the
moniker “Neutron Jack”. He hated bureaucracy of any form, and always sought people
who were dedicated to change. He was also an active teacher at the GE Leadership
Centre in Crottonville.

After nearly two decades at the helm Jack Welch prepared for departure followed by a
smooth succession. The person who was to take up his mantle was chosen from within
the GE organisation, through a long and rigorous process. This resulted in the anointing
of Jeffrey Immelt as the prospective CEO from April 2001 when Welch promised to
“walk away and keep walking”. Things didn’t just go to script. GE had acquired the
Honeywell Company in 1990, and Welch announced he wanted to stay in charge to
oversee the integration of this prized plant into his garden. However, the takeover was
scuttled when the European Commission raised objections that the resultant company
would have a dominant and potentially distorting role in the aviation financing sector in
Europe. Welch was thus denied a last charge towards the setting sun. Most observers felt
this did not do him any harm. At GE he was a larger-than-life figure.

Since retiring Jack Welch has continued to consult a number of Fortune 500 firms. He
also found the time to write his memoirs: Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001). Outside the
US the book had the less macho subtitle of Jack: What I've Learned Leading a Great
Company and Great People It went to number one in the best-sellers’ chart in America.
He has since added Winning: The Ultimate Business How-To Book (2005). This “…is a
book for the people in business who sweat, get their nails dirty, hire, fire, make hard
decisions, and pay the price when those decisions are wrong,"

Jim COLLINS
2007 ranking: 10

Jim Collins was born in Boulder, Colorado. He

studied business at Stanford and stayed on the faculty
after graduating. Having taught at Stanford for seven
years he returned to his home town to establish what
he called business research laboratory. Here he has
become “a self-employed professor who endowed his
own chair and granted himself tenure.” His laboratory
examines business issues and structures from a
statistical standpoint. “Others like opinions” says
Collins. “I prefer data.”

His research work has involved looking at vast

numbers of companies to find out what makes some
good, others great, and others still downright awful.
This involves a probe of how each company is
managed, and the role of its CEO. This has resulted in four books, including Good to
Great (2001).
Good to Great emerged from a simple question: Can a good company become a great
company? Collins and his researchers’ answer was yes - but it wasn’t easy. Collins
started with a data set of over a thousand companies, but whittled this down to 11 that
had consistently outperformed their rivals. These companies had things in common, but
not what conventional B school wisdom said they should have. It was easier to see what
they lacked: high profile CEOs, cutting-edge technology implementation, a business
strategy or even change management. What Collins did find amongst the eleven was a
common corporate culture that was big on the very outdated concept of discipline. This
was not the discipline of the martinet, but the good type – self-discipline. The companies
rewarded self-disciplined people who thought in a self-disciplined way.

But the difference between the good and the great was also down to different types of
leadership. Collins says he was initially a leadership skeptic: it was too simple to pin
great success or grim failure on the lapels of a leader. However this is what his data was
telling him. On further investigation he identified two levels of leadership – level 5 (the
great) and level 4 (the good).

None of this is cast in stone, and a level 4 leader can grade up. He cites Lou Gerstner as
an example: a Level 4 manager at R.J. Reynolds who became a level 5 manager at IBM -
though not immediately. Level 5 people have an almost heroic commitment to the
company and its mission. The company gets all their emotions – there’s no room or
energy for self promotion. This does not mean that Level 5 managers are shrinking
violets. They simply put the company before, well, everything – family, friends, and
probably their health. But they are never alone. They should have a good team around
them. This is their responsibility. Part of the mettle of the level 5 manager is deciding
who should be on the bus and where they should sit.

There are other qualities which set the great apart from the good. These include the
performance of their companies. These can be measured by financial results. Collins is a
keen believer in assessing success through the company’s stock price. This indicates a
preference for publicly-quoted companies.

A Level 5 leader must also have the respect of other business and industry players, such
as competitors. (Respect, of course, has nothing to do with liking).They should make an
impact on their company, maybe their industry, that outlasts them.

His researches also looked at the identity of CEOs. Those companies who chose their
chief executives from inside the organisation did better than those preferring outsiders.
He suggested that outsiders are ignorant of the company they are entering at the top, with
no gestation or apprenticeship period. He also suggested that outsiders lacked the
capacity for commitment to a long-term relationship along with its necessary sacrifices.

A good CEO should be neither too humble nor too proud. They should not be too
charismatic. They should ideally stay in the job for a minimum of seven years, as it was
not possible to have any impact in a lesser time.
In his latest book Built to Last (2002) Collins (along with Jerry Porras) continue their
analysis of visionary companies, looking at eighteen. These are united by widespread
brand recognition, are world famous, but have been in business for more than fifty years.

Collins’ research stems from the corporate arena, but he reminds his readers that the
lessons he puts forward are equally applicable in the non-corporate arena as well.

Philip KOTLER
2007 ranking: 11

Philip Kotler (b. 1931) is the S. C. Johnson Distinguished

Professor of International Marketing at the J. L. Kellogg
Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University.
Apart from his teaching and writing Kotler has worked as a
marketing and consultant to many of America’s top
companies.

Although his name is now inseparable from marketing

Kotler trained as an economist. He gained a master’s degree
from the University of Chicago and a doctorate from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He returned to
Chicago to complete post-doctoral research in behavioral
sciences, as well as undertaking research in mathematics at
Harvard.

When it comes to marketing Philip Kotler wrote THE book on the subject. His Marketing
Management: Application, Planning, Implementation and Control (1967), now in its
twelfth edition, is the core text of marketing courses on most MBA programmes.

Peter Drucker was the first to urge management to take marketing seriously. It was not
just as a fancy form of salesmanship, but one of the most important company functions
(along with innovation). Before Kotler marketing was synonymous with the marketing
mix and the four Ps (product, pricing, place and promotion). The marketing concept was
much broader, and the 4Ps had to be redefined too. Central to the book is the need for
companies to actively create and nurture markets. “Good companies will meet needs;
great companies will create markets,” This involved areas such as marketing planning,
market research and customer relationship management. Kotler has written that
marketing is vital to ‘value creation and raising the world’s living standards.” It is
“meeting needs profitably.” He has always tried to expand discussions about marketing
beyond production and service provision. He has written books on the marketing of
places, ideas and celebrities (High Visibility (1987). He has also produced works for
specialist audiences like Not-for-Profit organisations, religious congregations, even
museums. He believes that the most satisfying marketing job in the world is bringing
“more health and education to people and making a real difference in their quality of
life.”
The business world has changed a lot since Marketing Management was first published.
The nature of the four Ps had undergone transformation. Kotler considers that they are
still important “building-blocks”, but that each one has developed its own sub-set of
tools. Instead of just a marketing mix there is a pricing mix, a positioning mix and so on.
Markets and media have become more sophisticated. The power of brands has grown. So
too have the means by which producers and providers can create awareness. Marketing is
now a global activity. The world of marketing is dynamic. He has conducted research
into the impact of the Internet on the Marketing concept. This is contained in one of his
latest book Marketing Moves (2002). This talks about holistic marketing “ … where a
company combines the informational power of enterprise resource planning, supply chain
management, and customer relationship management to leverage greater success in the
marketplace.” This often leads to collaborative networks using the Internet, corporate
Intranets and Extranets to achieve growth. It is holistic because it no longer sees
marketing as a discrete, department-bound activity. It must become the “the architect of
the company’s demand-and-supply chain and its network of collaborators.” Marketing
has to be at the centre of business activity. It must concentrate on customers. “Customer
focus is critical in a world no longer marked by a shortage of goods but by a shortage of
customers.” He has looked at companies like amazon.com It initially seemed to possess
great competitive advantage because it did not have huge physical assets. It had to spend
huge amounts on marketing to build its brand and retain customer loyalty. Kotler also
believes that “M marketing” using mobile devices like mobile ‘phones, will also grow in
importance. Marketing managers will have to develop skills in

• Database management and data mining

• Partnership relationship management
• Telemarketing and call-centre management
• Customization of offerings, services and messages
• Experiential marketing

He also foresees marketing managers having access to “real time” information

dashboards. This will allow them to track prices, costs and sales of individual products in
real time.

Robert KAPLAN & David NORTON

2007 ranking: 12

Robert Kaplan, Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development

at Harvard Business School, is responsible for a landmark in the
history of organizational management. Together with his colleague
David Norton, Kaplan created the concept of the Balanced Scorecard
a means of linking a company's current actions to its long-term
goals. The method has been endorsed by corporate heavyweights
such as Mobil and Sears. The Balanced Scorecard envisages
executives as pilots with a range of controls and indicators in front of
them, based upon which they make decisions and develop strategies.
In Kaplan and Norton's recent book The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced
Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment (2000) the authors use
their extensive research of companies that implement the Balanced Scorecard to suggest a
new performance management framework centered on strategy.

Kjell NORDSTRÖM & Jonas RIDDERSTRÅLE

2007 ranking: 13

Kjell Nordström and Jonas Ridderstråle are

both professors at the Stockholm School of
Economics: Nordström at the Institute of
International Business; Ridderstråle at the
Centre for Advanced Studies in Leadership.
They both hold doctorates in International
business and economics and are highly
respected members of the Swedish academic
family. Both consult Swedish and international
companies, and have a broad range of business
interests.

They have achieved fame amongst the ranks of

management thinkers through their books and
their lectures, both of which are different. At
their lectures (they prefer to call them gigs) they appear (should that be perform?)
together, dressed in black. The similarities with the world of rock music are deliberate.
Their delivery is fast and punchy. Another flamboyant presenter, Tom Peters (a big fan)
might be described as a modern County-and-Western performer; these guys are definitely
hard-core heavy metal artistes.

Their first book Funky Business (1999) caught the atmosphere of their gigs. It contained
some stark and simple messages. The world of business had changed dramatically. What
will work has to be different in a revolutionary way.

“Traditional roles, jobs, skills, ways of doing things, insights, strategies, aspirations, fears
and expectations no longer count…. We cannot have business as usual. We need business
as unusual. We need different business, We need innovative business. We need
unpredictable business. We need surprising business. We need funky business.”

The successful organisations will be different too, unafraid of difference or creativity:

They will seek emotion. The meaning of e-commerce must be changed to emotional
commerce. Employees should be hired because they have some of that emotion. They can
then be trained to carry out specific skills. They should be sought in unusual ways at pop
concerts even, far removed from the traditional “milk round”.
Ideas are what will make a difference. Riches should be sought in niches wherever they
are, amongst “homosexual dentists or pigeon-fancying lawyers.”

The workplace of the future will be Funky Inc. It ‘"isn't like any other company. … [it]
thrives on the changing circumstances and unpredictability of our times." The future will
be incoherent, dominated by movement and speed, by the imperatives of “Move it, move
it fast, move it faster, Move it now.” The strengths of an organisation won’t be core
competencies but core competents, people whose skills and knowledge make a
difference. “These walking monopolies will stay as long as the company offers them
something they want. When that is no longer the case they will leave.”

Today’s world is a place of excess. This is the age of time and talent, both of which are
commodities. Talent will allow firms to be unique. The challenge is: How are you make
yourself more attractive, more sexy? In a world of economic Darwinism, survival is a
question of being either fit or sexy. Competition takes place using models and moods.
Fitness boils down to using market imperfections to your advantage. Masters of mood
exploit the imperfections of man by seducing or sedating consumer. Excellent companies
re-invent innovation.

Their second book Karaoke Capitalism (2004) was never going to be a dog-eared sequel
to their earlier volume, a mere “Funky 2”. The two Swedes attempted to get political and
ideological, and to ask what changes we can expect to emerge from a world dominated by
super-fast and soulless machines. In places the book reads like a manifesto, a call to the
barricades. The world is undergoing change on a scale unknown before, greater than the
move from an agricultural to an industrial society that took place in Europe two hundred
years ago. That took well over a century and was accompanied by major changes in
behaviour and religious observance, not to mention political changes too. Individuals
now have more choice than ever The world of Karaoke capitalism is increasingly
dominated by copy-cats bashing out cover versions of great originals.. Only imagination,
innovation and originality will place societies, organizations and individuals center-stage.
The book talks about how to create capitalism with character, and how to live a fulfilling
life while making a living. To develop the character of capitalism involves accepting
individual responsibility. “Look inside. Do you want to be a first-rate version of yourself
or a second-rate version of someone else?”

Both books are written in an uncompromising style. Sometimes they deliberately aim
below the belt and between the eyes.

Charles HANDY
2007 ranking: 14

Charles Handy (b. 1932) was born in Ireland. He was

brought up in the genteel penury of an Anglican parsonage
in a still rural part of County Kildare. He pursued his
education at Oriel College Oxford and then joined Royal
58Dutch Shell. The prospect of a posting to Liberia caused Handy to leave Shell in
favour of the position of Professor of Business management in the newly-founded
London Business School. In the mid ‘70s he worked in Windsor Castle, before deciding
to plough his own furrow in life as a writer, lecturer and consultant.

Handy coined the term “portfolio worker” for someone who worked independently of an
organisation and whose living was drawn from a number of differing elements, as in a
share portfolio. This future looked many people in the face. The growth of small,
individually run firms, especially in the UK has borne him out.

His first book Inside Organisations (1976) was an account of contemporary business
structure. Some critics said that he had put forward old and accepted ideas in a new way.

It was only when Handy parachuted out from the world of secure employment that his
talents as a writer on management (and much else) blossomed. In The Age of Unreason
(1989) he proposed the Shamrock organisation as a business model. Many have tied the
symbol to his Irish background. The shamrock has long been powerful in the Anglican
Church of Ireland because of its apocryphal use by St Patrick as a symbol of the Holy
Trinity. For Handy the first of the three leaves represented the professional managers and
administrators – the organisational core. This leaf is shrinking in size. The second leaf
contained the contractual fringe. Its contributors to the organisation were vital, but they
were outsiders. In the third leaf were those including the portfolio workers, as well as
temporary workers and part-timers. They contributed much, but they could never be
considered part of the organisation. Many didn’t want to be. They wanted jobs but not
careers. They frequently worked for a number of disparate organisations. In Handy’s
language they were like fleas feeding off elephants. The latter were the large
organisations. This was an analogy he pursued in the autobiographical The Elephant and
the Flea (2001).

When he writes about management he is never prescriptive. It is a fallacy to believe that

there is one, correct style of management. In Gods of Management (1995) he isolates four
different management styles or cultures. He draws an analogy between these and
religious cults in ancient Greece. The partisans of Zeus he compares to those belonging to
a “club”-like organisation. The partisans of Apollo followed a rank culture, found in
bureaucracies and large organisations. Followers of Athena believed in a task-based
culture, often working in teams; while the Dionysians were bigger than any organisation
to which they might belong. They are typified by professionals like barristers. None were
better than the others. They were simply better-suited to certain contexts. They could all
achieve results. Their presence had to be respected. But they should never be forced on
an organisation that had a different culture.

Reading Charles Handy is like having conversation in a leafy vicarage on a Sunday

afternoon. Handy dominates the discussion but not in a domineering way. His
contributions are peppered with opinionated and frequently amusing asides. His
comments are made in a deferentially certain manner.
Handy does not see himself as a management guru, but a social philosopher. He laments
that blind greed still motivates too many. “We have created a mercenary society. Getting
richer and richer, and bigger and bigger has become a substitute for not believing in what
we are doing”.

Handy’s writings and activities are far-flung. He has always had much to say (frequently
critical) about education. His own education did not prepare him for “life as a flea”. He
believes that little has changed since. The flea existence looks many people in the face,
but they have been given neither the emotional nor the intellectual tools for it. People will
have to craft their own futures. He helps those who try. He was involved in the
development of the Open University’s MBA programme, insisting on the incorporation
of practical, “on-the-job” elements.

He is a frequent broadcaster, this includes his accessible series for the BBC World
Service “The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management”.

Stephen COVEY
2007 ranking: 15

Stephen Covey is the benchmark for the modern-day

guru. First he studied success literature, then he created
his own success story. He markets commonsense as
timeless wisdom. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective
People was on the New York Times bestseller lists for
250 weeks.

Covey reached a huge global audience with the success

of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989)
which has sold over six million copies. Along the way,
the devout Mormon transformed himself into an end-of-
the-century Dale Carnegie. ‘He has sold himself with a
brashness that makes the over-excited Tom Peters look
like a shrinking violet,’ noted The Economist. Another
commentator observed that ‘Mr Covey has a knack of
dressing up spiritual principles in pinstripes’. In fact, Covey’s ‘principles’ are a mixture
of the commonsensical and the hackneyed – ‘be proactive; begin with the end in mind;
put first things first; think win/win; seek first to understand then to be understood;
synergize; sharpen the saw’. Yet, it is their very simplicity and accessibility which partly
explains Covey’s astonishing success.

Success has created a corporation. Franklin Covey was created in 1997 by the merger of
training company Franklin Quest and the Covey Leadership Center and now offers “a
broad array of professional services and products that work together to help you get
results”. These include publications, software programs and has 180 retail stores. The
company has 4,500 “members” and boasts that its clients include 90 of the Fortune 100
and three-quarters of the Fortune 500. Covey’s empire is fast becoming a dynasty --
Covey’s son Sean is the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens. The
FranklinCovey Company now employs over 4300 people and has an annual turnover of
$500 million.

Henry MINTZBERG
2007 ranking: 16

There is more to Henry Mintzberg than strategy.

Witness his latest book: Why I Hate Flying, a
brilliantly sardonic look at management in the
airline industry. Next in line is a book exploring
management education, one of Mintzberg’s longest
held bugbears. Indeed, as befits an iconoclast, a
common theme throughout Mintzberg’s career has
been a willingness to bite the hand that feeds him.
For a man employed by two business schools –
Montreal’s McGill and France’s INSEAD – he has
proved a relentless thorn in the side of conventional
b-school education. The fruit of his dissatisfaction
was the International Masters Program in
Management, a thoroughly global program which
encourages managers to break free of the limitations of functional, and other,
perspectives.

His career began with his PhD research which saw him examining what managers
actually did. Hardly rocket science, but a strangely unusual strategy. The result was The
Nature of Managerial Work (1973) was the result – one of the few (very few) books
which actually examines what managers do rather than discussing what they should do.

Since then, Mintzberg has set the agenda in the sphere of strategic management with a
combination of academic rigour and a devotion to seeking out new perspectives which
has generally set him apart from his contemporaries. This reached a climax with the
publication of The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, a coherent tour-de-force which
sounded the death knell for the strategic orthodoxy which had long dominated
management thinking and education. His most recent strategy book is Strategy Safari.

Mintzberg is working on his next book Developing Managers, Not MBAs. No doubt the
book will include more of Mintzberg’s forthright opinions on the subject as expressed in
a recent interview: “I think every MBA should have a skull and crossbones stamped on
their forehead and underneath should be written: "Warning: not prepared to manage."

Warren BENNIS
2007 ranking: 24

Now in his seventies, Warren Bennis still runs

most days before work. His intellectual energy
and output remains formidable. He is a
humanist with high hopes for humanity. "I
think that every person has to make a genuine
contribution in their lives and the institution of
work is one of the main vehicles to achieving
this", he has said. "I'm more and more
convinced that individual leaders can create a
human community that will, in the long run,
lead to the best organizations."

In the 1950s, at the MIT Sloan School of

Management, Warren Bennis (b. 1925) was a
protege of Douglas McGregor, whose work on
motivation influenced his later thinking. In the 1960s, Bennis' work - particularly his
1968 book The Temporary Society - explored new organizational forms, envisaging
organizations as adhocracies - the opposite of bureaucracies. But it is for his work on
leadership that he is best known.

In the 1980s Bennis and others brought a new rigor and vigor to a topic that had been
previously neglected by management scholars. In a now famous study of 90 American
leaders, he sought to identify the common traits of effective leaders. In place of the man
or woman of destiny, he offered a view of leadership based on four factors: vision,
meaning, trust, and the deployment of self.

He is now based at The Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern

California which in in May 2001 hosted a "festschrift" - a celebration of his 40-year
career with a conference devoted to his scholarly work which included luminaries such as
Peter Drucker, Charles Handy, Tom Peters, as well as top business leaders, educators,
and journalists. Bennis has made a contribution to an array of subjects and produced a
steady stream of books including the bestselling, Leaders and, most recently, Old Dogs,
New Tricks (with Ken Shelton, 1999).

2007 ranking: 26

Thomas Friedman

Thomas L. Friedman is a journalist best known for his work

as an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and his works
on globalization. After studying at Brandeis University and
Oxford he worked for United Press International in London
and Beirut. He then joined the staff of the New York Times
and began his op-ed work in 1994. He has written
extensively on a range of topics, Including Terrorism and US Foreign Policy besides
globalization.

For Friedman globalization is an international system which has replaced the Cold War
as a means of organizing the world. It has its own rules and internal dynamics, and
influences politics, economics, the environment, culture - in short everything. Its impact
is discernible in today's world.

His book The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999) was an in-depth exploration of
globalization. The Lexus of the title represented a struggle for prosperity and
development. This runs parallel with a drive to maintain cultural identity and values,
symbolised by the olive tree.

His book unearthed a number of concepts to which Friedman gave colourful labels. In a
world dominated by ever-more liberal capital markets and trade regimes all counties must
cede some sovereignty to multi-national corporations and global sources of capital. He
termed this The Global Straitjacket. Furthermore, when there are no barriers to capital
movement, markets can be subject to often irrational forces, as happened during the
South-East Asian Financial crisis of 1997. Friedman described these as the actions of the
Electronic Herd. Perhaps his most controversial coining was the Golden Arches Theory
of Conflict Prevention. No two countries with branches of McDonald's have yet fought a
war. Put simply, both countries are involved in an economic world where making money
is always more important than making war.

His second book, The World is Flat, was written after visits to Bangalore. India and
Shanghai. The title is a reflection of the globalized world with ever fewer economic and
increasingly political barriers. Friedman believes globalization has moved on, from a
borderlessness affecting only governments (Globalization 1), through a stage involving
companies and commercial entities (Globalization 2), to a world where globalization
increasingly impacts on individuals (Globalization 3).

Friedman is fond of lists, and in The Earth is Flat he lists ten "flatteners" that have aided
globalization. They are:

1. The Fall of the Berlin Wall.

2. The availability of simple-to-use and install web browsers.
3. Workflow software.
4. Open sourcing of software programming.
5. Outsourcing.
6. Offshoring
7. Supply chaining.
8. Insourcing,
9. In-forming - the growth of Google and other search engines.
10. The Steroids - mobile phones, iPods, PDAs, Voice-over Internet technology etc.

Globalization is undergoing a Triple Convergence. This includes:

 1. A coming together of all the disparate flatteners. Up to 200 they tended to be
independent players, but in the new millennium they have had a mutual impact
upon each other.
2. Horizontalization - co-operation between companies to aid innovation.
3. The unleashing of brain-power from previously non-capitalist economies.

Friedman's comments on the US economy have also been influential and controversial.
He has written that the US must openly embrace globalization. This means acceptance of
increasing outsourcing of jobs to low-cost economies. Friedman argues that the jobs lost
can be replaced by much better paid and high-status posts, which are dependent on
Americans acquiring greater skill-sets through education. This openness to the world
should not be restricted to trade, It should include an openness to immigration. He has
described reluctance by the US Congress to fully open America to immigration as "pure
idiocy". Although a fanatical advocate of free trade he believes the US should pursue
greater energy security, especially through production of bioethanol and other fuel
alternatives.. This would benefit US trade figures and lessen dependence on often volatile
sources of supply. It might also cause positive regime changes in those states which have
traditionally relied on petrodollars to maintain authoritarian structures. This form of
pressure is, in Friedman's view, preferable in the long-term to more direct forms of
intervention.

Kenichi OHMAE
2007 ranking: 27

Described by the Financial Times as "Japan's only

successful management guru," Dr. Kenichi Ohmae (b.
1943) is an acclaimed Japanese management strategist
renown for his work on globalization and the borderless
economy. Bright does not begin to describe Ohmae's
intellectual powers. He is a concert playing flautist, a
nuclear physicist, would-be politician, McKinsey
consultant and much more.

A graduate of Waseda Unversity and the Tokyo Institute of

Technology, Ohmae joined McKinsey consultants in 1972
after the completion of his PhD at MIT. He spent 23 years
at McKinsey where he cofounded its strategic management
practice, eventually leaving to stand for the Governorship
of Tokyo in 1995.
Ohmae is also the dean of two private schools in Tokyo: Isshinjuku, which studies public
policy, and Attacker's Advantage, which studies Entrepreneurship. He is also the
Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA School of Public and Social
Research.
In his recent book "The Invisible Continent: 4 Strategic Imperatives of the New
Economy" (2000) Ohmae examines the relationship between old economy "Titans" like
IBM and new economy "Godzillas" such as Dell and Cisco and identifies four basic
forces influencing the new economy. Ohmae's latest book is The Emergence of the
United States of Chunghwa (2003) in which he predicts that by 2005 Taiwan will
politically integrate with China in the so-called "United States of Chunghwa"

Rosabeth MOSS KANTER

2007 ranking: 28

Rosabeth Moss Kanter holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard

Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for
change. Her strategic and practical insights have guided leaders of large and small
organizations worldwide for over 25 years, through teaching, writing, and direct
consultation to major corporations and governments. The former Editor of Harvard
Business Review (1989-1992), Professor Kanter has been named to lists of the “50 most
powerful women in the world” (Times of London), and the “50 most influential business
thinkers in the world” (Accenture and Thinkers 50 research). In 2001, she received the
Academy of Management’s Distinguished Career Award for her scholarly contributions
to management knowledge, and in 2002 was named “Intelligent Community Visionary of
the Year” by the World Teleport Association. Her current work continues her focus on
the transformation of major institutions such as global corporations, health care delivery
systems, and other organizations seeking innovative new models.

Professor Kanter is the author or co-author of 16 books, which have been translated into
17 languages. Her latest book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks
Begin & End (a New York Times business and #1 Business Week bestseller), describes the
culture and dynamics of high-performance organizations as compared with those in
decline, and shows how to lead turnarounds, whether in businesses, hospitals, schools,
sports teams, community organizations, or countries. Her classic prizewinning book, Men
& Women of the Corporation (C. Wright Mills award winner for the year’s best book on
social issues) offered insight to countless individuals and organizations about corporate
careers and the individual and organizational factors that promote success; a spin-off
video, A Tale of ‘O’: On Being Different, is among the world’s most widely-used
diversity tools; and a related book, Work & Family in the United States, set a policy
agenda (in 2001, a coalition of university centers created the Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Award in her honor for the best research on work/family issues). Another award-winning
book, When Giants Learn to Dance, showed many companies worldwide how to master
the new terms of competition at the dawn of the global information age. World Class:
Thriving Locally in the Global Economy identified the rise of new business networks and
analyzed the benefits and tensions of globalization; it has guided public officials and
civic leaders in developing strategies and skills for the economy of the future.

She has received 22 honorary doctoral degrees, as well as numerous leadership awards
and prizes for her books and articles; for example, her book The Change Masters was
named one of the most influential business books of the 20th century (Financial Times).
Through Goodmeasure Inc., the consulting group she co-founded, she has partnered with
IBM to bring her leadership tools, originally developed for businesses, to public
education as part of IBM’s award-winning Reinventing Education initiative. She is an
adviser to the CEOs of large and small companies, has served on numerous business and
non-profit boards and national or regional commissions, and speaks widely, often sharing
the platform with Presidents, Prime Ministers, and CEOs at national and international
events, such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Before joining the
Harvard Business School faculty, she held tenured professorships at Yale University and
Brandeis University and was a Fellow at Harvard Law School, simultaneously holding a
Guggenheim Fellowship.

Her latest initiative involves the development and creation of an innovative institute for
advanced leadership, to ensure that successful leaders at the top of their professions can
apply their skills not only to managing their own enterprises but also to helping solve the
most challenging national and global problems.

Marcus BUCKINGHAM
2007 ranking: 38

Marcus Buckingham

At first Marcus Buckingham seems an unlikely management guru. He is a cricket-loving

Englishman and graduate of Cambridge University. His very name sounds so aristocratic.
Buckingham is one of the business world's most sought-after speakers, but for a long time
he had a punishing stammer which he has successfully overcome. He still admits to
nerves before going on stage.

Marcus Buckingham's message is innovative and fundamentally positive. He believes it's

better to concentrate on strengths, instead of worrying about weaknesses and trying to fix
them. We all have strengths and talents. Sometimes individuals don't know what their
strengths are. To help them identify their talents, he pioneered the Strengths Finder Test
while working as a senior researcher with the Gallop Organization. Once people know
their strengths they must be prepared to contribute them, but this is where good
management kicks in.

Good managers should recognise these talents and appreciate the talents they have, and
not try to put square pegs into round holes by attempting to fit individuals to tasks.
Managers must equip employees with the skills and tools to help them contribute to their
organization, and most importantly they must find adequate means of rewarding
employees for success.

Buckingham likes being iconoclastic. There is something irresistibly attractive about the
title of his book First, Break all the Rules, co-authored with Curt Coffmann in 1999. It
stresses that one of the most important factors in business success is the happiness of an
organization's employees, and this in turn is dependant upon managers behaving in an
innovative way. This iconoclastic aspect is made even clearer by the book's subtitle:
What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently. This was not a work written on a
whim and a hunch. It was based on 88,000 interviews with managers carried out by
Gallup. These were mangers who demonstrated success in transforming employment
talent into great performance. Some were top managers in Fortune 500 companies; others
in much smaller operations, of differing ages and cultural backgrounds. The one thing
they had in common was that they had nothing in common. They were also not hide-
bound by convention. Buckingham argued that these showed that the best managers have
unlearned a lot of the received truths about management. In this way they have been able
to foster and retain talent.

Buckingham was able to discover patterns in their behavior. He called these keys: the
first was selecting talent. Talent has to be seen as different from skill or experience. The
second key is Defining the Right Outcome. Before an employee can perform well in their
task, their manager must have a very clear understanding of what this is. The third key is
focusing on strengths, while a fourth key involves finding the right fit. A successful
manager is able to turn these keys.

In addition good managers treat all employees as individuals, with strengths and
weaknesses, but they concentrate on developing these strengths, and finally they find
adequate means of rewarding their employees for jobs well done. They should then
provide them with the training and necessary support to achieve this.

In The One Thing You Need to Know (2005) Buckingham is once again in iconoclastic
mode. He sees accepted views on leadership, management, and individual performance as
at best hazy. They are often expressed more often than they are realised. In particular, he
explores the confusion between leadership and management.

Buckingham is a very effective disseminator of his ideas. There are his best-selling
books, as well as his frequent appearances as a speaker. He has also shown himself ready
to embrace American television. He has made a series of short motivational films called
Trombone Player Wanted. The title comes from his frustration at being compelled to
learn to play the instrument as a boy - something he had no talent for and which he didn't
like. In 3007 he took his message onto the roads of the US in a national bus tour.

He is the founder and CEO of The Marcus Buckingham Company whose professed aim
is: to help individuals express the best of themselves and make their greatest contribution
possible- at work, at home and in life.

Seth GODIN
2007 ranking: 43
Seth Godin
Seth Godin is a guru of marketing in the world of the Internet. He is a writer, speaker and
most importantly, a practitioner.

Godin has a great knack for coining concepts and ideas that have become embedded in
marketing thinking Permission Marketing and the IdeaVirus. He is no mere theoretician
of marketing; most of these concepts have been learned in the world of business. He was
the joint founder and owner of Yoyodyne an online marketing company. This was bought
by Yahoo! In 1998 when Godin became Yahoo!'s vice-president of Permission
Marketing.

He has always been obsessed by communication between people. He relates in his

biography how he was entranced by the present of a short-wave radio as a child. This
enabled him to talk to people at great distances without wires.

The Internet has radically changed the world for marketers. This has caused the end of
"the TV-Industrial complex" where marketers felt they owned potential customers. The
means used by marketers in traditional advertising was what Godin called "interruption
marketing". They tried to market their product or service by interrupting potential
customers while they were doing something they liked or found more interesting. This
was risky, costly, and in Godin's view, ultimately futile.

There was a need for a new form of marketing, and the Internet provided an opportunity
for it. Godin calls this Permission Marketing, which he describes as turning enemies into
friends and friends into customers. The marketer finds out whether the potential customer
is interested in the product or service; once interest has been shown, say by the would-be
customer clicking on a link, they are communicated with.

Success through the Internet and permission marketing cannot be taken for granted. The
company website was the new shop-window and in The Big Red Fez (2001)Godin
illustrated good and bad websites. A central tenet of Permission Marketing must be
respect for the customer. So Godin is an inveterate opponent of Spam. In his words "It's
unanticipated, impersonal irrelevant junk that steals from the recipient ... it's not like the
plague. It is the plague."

But even with a great website, and respect for the customer, success is still not
guaranteed. What is needed is a great product or service, what Godin calls a Purple Cow.
It must be really different and innovative and have the power to infect would-be
customers. It must be an IdeaVirus.

Godin sees the potential market as a hive. The IdeaVirus is then spread by "Sneezers".
There are two types of effective sneezers; the promiscuous sneezers, who can be
visualized as those people who, in spite of having a heavy cold, don't care where they
sneeze or whom they may infect. They may be motivated to spread an idea by money, but
in reality they don't really care who gets the IdeaVirus. Powerful Sneezers are the second
type. These are trend-settees; they have a dedicated group of followers who tend to adopt
anything they use, as they view the powerful sneezers as "in the know". They cannot be
bought and adopt an idea or a product out of genuine love.

IdeaViruses can be spread virally, this is independent of dedicated sneezers. This happens
like an epidemic. The effect is cumulative; the IdeaVirus spreads through constant take-
up and use.

Godin put his ideas about the IdeaVirus into a pithy little book called Unleashing the
IdeaVirus. He then put his words where his ideas were; instead of relying on traditional
publishing and distribution methods, he made it available for free downloading on the
Internet. What was more he gave everyone who downloaded it complete licence to print
it out, e-mail it to friends and colleagues and generally do whatever they liked. As a result
it became the most downloaded e-book of all time. It was also published in a more
conventional format and translated into 10 languages. Godin benefited from this ideavirus
by an increase in speaking engagements.

His most recent book Meatball Sundae examines the fundamental shifts taking place
within the world of marketing and how problems arise when the challenges of "old" and
"new" marketing collide. Godin states that current businesses must ask is: "'How can we
alter our business to become an organization that thrives on new marketing?'

Richard D'AVENI
2007 ranking: 46

RICHARD A. D'AVENI: BIOGRAPHY

Richard D'Aveni is one of the pre-eminent strategists of his generation. Best known for
his work on hyper-competition, D'Aveni is Professor of Strategic Management at the
Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and a winner of the prestigious A. T.
Kearney Award for his research.

A highly sought after advisor and speaker, D'Aveni has addressed senior executive
audiences all over the world, including the World Economic Forum's Annual Summit at
Davos, Switzerland; and the French Senate, in Paris. He consults to Fortune 500
companies as well as some of the world's wealthiest families, helping them shape their
winning strategies.

According to The (London) Times: "D'Aveni is strategy's answer to realpolitik. The

champion of dynamic strategy over static analysis, he is a battlefield general in a world
dominated by Ivy League theorists."

Thought Leadership
Professor D'Aveni is the author of several highly influential articles in the Harvard
Business Review and Sloan Management Review, as well as the bestselling book Hyper-
competition, which is available in 11 languages. His follow-up book, Strategic
Supremacy, is available in 4 languages. His new book, Beating the Commodity Trap:
How Smart Companies Out-maneuver their Rivals to Win the Price War, is forthcoming
in 2008.

His writings are credited with creating a new paradigm in the field of strategic
management based on temporary advantages - using rapid maneuvering rather than on
defensive barriers.

His client list includes some of the world's best-known companies. Among them: GE,
Citibank/Salomon Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, Pepsico, General Motors, and
Schering Plough; and major European companies such as Fininvest Italia, Philips
Electronics, and Reuters. He also consults to a small number of individual business
leaders.

Biography

Peter SENGE
2007 ranking: 47

Peter Senge (born 1947) is a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology and Chairperson of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) . He
is also a founding partner of the training and consulting company, Innovation Associates,
now part of Arthur D. Little. Senge graduated in engineering from Stanford before doing
a PhD on social systems modeling at MIT.

Senge argues that learning is the best form of competitive advantage and popularized the
term "learning organization" thanks to his 1990 bestseller The Fifth Discipline. His
subsequent co-authored books include The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and
Tools for Building a Learning Organization (1994), Schools That Learn (2000) and The
Dance of Change (1999).

Chris ARGYRIS
2007 ranking: 48

Harvard Business School's Chris Argyris is the father of the learning organization
though MIT's Peter Senge tends to receive most of the plaudits. Argyris' work has
never become populist though it has retained its popularity. He has pursued an admirably
independent line, coaxing ideas along rather than detonating them in front of gasping
audiences. His best work has a knack of infiltrating the underside of organizations - and,
more depressingly, human behavior. A convinced romantic, he believes people's potential
can - and should - be fulfilled. Along with Donald Schon, he introduced the concepts of
single-loop and double-loop learning.

Argyris' key books are Personality and Organization (1957) and Organizational
Learning (with Donald Schon, 1978). In his most recent book Flawed Advice and the
Management Trap: How Managers Can Know When They're Getting Good Advice and
When They're Not (1999) Argyris turns his attention towards the field of organizational
change. He is clearly unimpressed with much of the current advice, opinion and
commentary handed down by academics, consultants and commentators believing that it,
"does not work. . . . It is simply too full of abstract claims, inconsistencies, and logical
gaps to be useful as a concrete basis for concrete actions in concrete settings."