The first authoritative ranking of business intellectuals offers managers and executives an objective way to evaluate who's who among purveyors of management advice and new ideas. Outlook Journal, January 2003
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PDF Help If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And when it comes to measuring, one highly popular yardstick is the published ranking. Take the Fortune 500. Sure, it's simply a measure of
revenues. But because it offers one gauge of corporate performance, investors and fund managers can do something with it. Other lists, measuring other aspects of performance, can also be useful. (And besides, rankings can be fun.)
  Michael Porter (upper left), Tom Peters (upper right), Bill Gates (lower left), Malcolm Gladwell (lower right)
These days, rankings seem to be everywhere—the biggest, the
best, the richest. Yet despite the billions of dollars spent each year on management advice and on implementing new management ideas, there is no authoritative ranking of the business intellectuals—the "gurus"—whose stock in
trade is new ideas and advice.
 Enlarge The Top 50
Business Gurus
There is no shortage of guru lists out there, to be sure, but
Accenture has never seen one that offers an objective, quantitative ranking.
Business publications generally gather nominees, then editors or boards of
experts rank them according to largely subjective criteria. But while these
lists might provoke lively debate around the watercooler (and perhaps generate
enough buzz to sell extra copies of the magazine), they offer managers and
executives little in the way of practical, actionable information.
Measuring Impact
But thanks to the World Wide Web and various online databases, it is now possible to
objectively measure the impact of business gurus, and from there to create a
credible ranking. As part of a broader project to identify the process by which business and management ideas enter organizations¹, the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change has created such a ranking: The Top 50
Business Gurus.
We began with a list of more than 300 names, ranked
according to the three criteria used by American scholar and jurist Richard
Posner in 2002 to create a similar list of “public intellectuals²." The criteria are:
- Hits by Google, the Internet search engine, using the variations of a guru's name (for example, Michael Porter, Michael E. Porter, Mike Porter) minus any of those hits that are not relevant to the guru. Google offers a measure of how much a guru is being talked about
on the Web and his or her ability to capture the public's attention across the
globe (or at least the English-speaking parts of it; most management theory is
written in that language).
- Citations in the ISI Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)—that is, the number of times that academics have cited the
guru's published work. Because this measure indicates a guru's ability to
garner the attention of serious scholars, it gives the guru credibility (or, at
the very least, a certain notoriety). Leading universities use the SSCI to determine a scholar's impact, reputation or worthiness for tenure.
- Media mentions in LexisNexis, the online
database of English-language business and popular media. This measures the extent to which a guru is seen, heard and talked about through channels other than the Internet. It also offers a measure of whether a guru has the respect
and attention of the gatekeepers to corporate America's attention—the business press.
 In
short, a leading guru must be highly visible on the Internet, publish work that is widely known in the academic world and be frequently mentioned in the media.
(Unlike Posner, we excluded people who are no longer alive.) Rankings in each
of these individual categories were given a corresponding numerical score. For
example, if a guru ranked No. 1 in Internet hits, No. 6 in SSCI citations and
No. 20 in media mentions, those scores would be 1, 6 and 20. Overall guru
rankings are based on the sum of these three scores, which, in this example,
would be 27 (the lower the total score, of course, the higher the overall
ranking).
Although perhaps confirming some suspicions, our Top 50 runs counter to several longstanding assumptions held by industry experts—and,
more important, held by the managers who use ideas popularized by gurus.
For example, nearly every opinion-based list—and just about
everyone else's knee-jerk supposition—puts Peter Drucker in the top spot. Our
research suggests, however, that Drucker's supposed "hegemony"—as
Business 2.0 described it a few years back—is now over. With
comparatively few mentions in non-business categories (SSCI and media
mentions), this perennial favorite comes in at No. 4 on our list.
So who is No. 1? Michael Porter, the well-respected
strategist, Harvard Business School professor and author of two classic
business texts, Competitive Strategy and Competitive
Advantage. Much more a scholar and consultant than a media celebrity—though he also scored well in media mentions—Porter continues to
conduct serious research. His critique of the dot-com era, "Strategy and the Internet," was named best Harvard Business Review article for
2001 (a distinction he won for an unprecedented third time). Rounding out the first five are Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of
Excellence, in second place; Robert Reich, US Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, in third; and University of Chicago economist and
Nobel laureate Gary Becker in fifth.
Another popular misconception is that gurus aren't
"organization men" but are instead mavericks who make and market themselves
without the benefit of institutional ties. But a scan of the Top 50 shows the
central role that brand-name affiliations play in establishing and marketing a guru's reputation. For example, the associations Jack Welch (No. 34) and
Richard Branson (No. 45) have with two of the best-known corporate names in the
world, GE and Virgin, thrust them into the Top 50 by sheer volume of media
mentions and Web hits.
In fact, without the significant hurdle of the SSCI, which shows scholarly impact and thus does little to boost a corporate chieftain's ranking, both Welch and Branson would have placed in the top five. They would
have trailed Bill Gates, however, whose Microsoft brand gave him the No. 1
position in both Google hits and media mentions and the No.19 ranking overall.
But nothing boosts a guru's ranking like the combination of
brand and academic credentials. Seven of the top 10 have ties to leading
universities, including Harvard (Porter), the University of Chicago (Becker),
MIT (Peter Senge) and the University of California at Berkeley (Hal Varian).
The list also reveals striking biases in gender and
nationality. Clearly the shifting demographics evident in much of the business
world—precipitated by globalization and the rise of women to positions of power
and influence—have yet to be felt in the halls of gurudom. There are only two
women among the Top 50—Harvard's Rosabeth Moss Kanter (No. 11) and Esther Dyson, chairperson of EDventure Holdings, at No. 32. And 44 of the 50 are
Americans, at least by residence. The six exceptions: Charles Handy, Sumantra
Ghoshal and Branson, all of the United Kingdom; Canadian Don Tapscott; Ken
Ohmae of Japan; and Edward de Bono, who writes from the De Bono Institute in
Australia.
No doubt the American business hype machine, which sets the
world standard, clearly favors its own (especially its own men). On the other hand, given the historic US dominance of the world's economy, the global
prevalence of American business methods and models, and the worldwide
reputations of American business schools, this tilt toward US gurus is perhaps
understandable.
Finally, while there is very little diversity of gender and
home base, there is a surprising variety in the backgrounds of the Top 50. If
Drucker is the prototypical guru, it is the interdisciplinary nature of this
thinking that others emulate, not his résumé. Although nearly all of the Top 50
are boundary spanners in terms of profession—many circulate from consulting to
academia to journalism and back—the institutional ties we described above
reveal four basic types of gurus in the Top 50: business academics (27),
consultants (16), practicing managers (4), and journalists (3).
But there is significant heterogeneity within each taxonomic
type, suggesting that managers need a variety of intellectual talents to help
them make their organizations more efficient, effective and innovative.
For example, journalist Malcolm Gladwell, of New
Yorker fame, writes on the social aspects of organizations—including a
recent scathing critique of "the war for talent"—and markets, while Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine, writes and speaks
about the parallels between biology and information networks. Academic Varian
of Cal Berkeley uses economics as a lens on information management for business-people, while the University of Chicago’s Becker uses economics as a lens on the social aspects of organizational productivity.
Although they vary in the issues they address, our Top 50
gurus have one thing in common: a desire to influence the practice of business and management. In his autobiography posted on the Nobel Foundation website,
Becker puts it this way: "[Agreeing to write a monthly column for
BusinessWeek] was a wise decision, for I was forced . . . to
write about economic and social issues without using technical jargon, and in
about 800 words per column. Doing this has enormously improved my capacity to
discuss important subjects briefly and in simple language . . . [and it] makes
me stay abreast of many subjects that interest the business and professional readers of the magazine."
Successful companies are not, of course, built on Nobel
prizes, best-selling business books or mountains of scholarly output. In the end, what is required is that critical alchemy that turns ideas from many sources into applied innovation and best business practices. And it is at this
point that the gurus cede center stage to the executives and managers who must put the ideas to work.
 ¹What's the Big
Idea? is co-authored by Thomas H. Davenport, Laurence Prusak and James Wilson. It will be published by Harvard Business School Press in the spring of
2003.
²Richard A. Posner,
Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Harvard University
Press, 2002).
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