World's 10 top management gurus

[SUKUHOPES]

"Deregulation, emerging markets, new forms of globalisation,
convergence of technologies and industries, and ubiquitous
connectivity, these have changed many aspects of business," said
management guru C K Prahalad in an interview.

Prahalad is the world's topmost management guru and the first Indian-
born thinker to claim the title.

The Thinkers 50 2007 list, produced by Suntop Media in association
with Skillsoft, is a definitive guide to who is the most influential
living management thinker.

Although the list is still dominated by North Americans (37 of the 50
gurus are from the United States), three more Indian management
experts have made it to the Top 50. As yet, no Chinese guru has
emerged.

To find out about the other nine who completed the top 10, read
on. . .

1. C K PRAHALAD
==============

Coimbatore Krishnao Prahalad was born in the town of Coimbatore in
Tamil Nadu. He studied physics at the University of Madras (now
Chennai); worked as a manager in a branch of the Union Carbide battery
company, then went to the Harvard University and earned a PhD.

Prahalad, is now the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University
Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan,
specializes in corporate strategy.

His books include:

Multinational Mission: Balancing Local Demands and Global Vision
(1987), coauthored with Yves Doz,
Competing for the Future (1994), co-authored with Gary Hamel. Printed
in fourteen languages, the book was named the Best Selling Business
Book of the Year in 1994, and
The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers
(2004) (coauthored with Venkatram Ramaswamy).
On his vision about India, Prahalad says: "As a country, India must
have high and shared aspirations like it had in 1929 when the leaders
of the then Congress party declared their ambition as Poorna Swaraj.
Since then, India has never had a national aspiration which every
Indian could share."

2. BILL GATES
============

For long the world?s richest man, till he was upstaged by legendary
investor Warren Buffett recently, Bill Gates wears many a hat:
computer whiz kid, entrepreneur extraordinaire, compassionate
capitalist, top management thinker. . .

Born on October 28, 1955, William H Gates III grew up in Seattle with
his two sisters.

Their father, William H Gates II, is a Seattle attorney. Their late
mother, Mary, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent,
and chairwoman of United Way International.

Gates attended public elementary school and the private Lakeside
School. There, he discovered his interest in software and began
programming computers at age 13.

In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a freshman, where he
lived down the hall from Steve Ballmer, now Microsoft's chief
executive officer. While at Harvard, Gates developed a version of the
programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer - the MITS
Altair.

In his junior year, Gates left Harvard to devote his energies to
Microsoft, a company he had begun in 1975 with his childhood friend
Paul Allen.

Books that he wrote:

The Road Ahead (1995), held the No. 1 spot on the New York Times'
bestseller list for seven weeks.
Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999). Published in 25 languages the
book is available in more than 60 countries.
Bill Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in
January, 2000; remained as chairman and created the position of chief
software architect. Gates's last full-time day at Microsoft was June
27, 2008. He remains at Microsoft as a part-time, non-executive
chairman.

Gates married Melinda French from Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994.
They have three children: Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John
Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002).

Bill Gates' house is a 21st century earth-sheltered home in the side
of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington.

3. ALAN GREENSPAN
=================

Born on March 6, 1926 in New York City, Alan Greenspan was Chairman of
the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve of the United States --
the US Fed -- from 1987 to 2006. It was said that when he sneezed, the
world caught a cold.

He currently works as a private advisor, making speeches and providing
consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC.

Greenspan was lauded for his handling of the Black Monday stock market
crash that occurred very shortly after he first became chairman, as
well as for his stewardship of the Internet-driven, 'dot-com' economic
boom of the 1990s.

Greenspan is an accomplished saxophone player. While in college, he
played in a jazz band.

He attended New York University, and received a BS in Economics in
1948, and a MA in 1950.

Greenspan went to the Columbia University, intending to pursue
advanced economic studies, but subsequently dropped out.

In 1977, NYU awarded him a Ph.D. in Economics. On December 14, 2005,
he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Commercial Science from NYU, his
fourth degree from that institution.

Greenspan was famous for his ability to give technical and confusing
speeches. US News & World Report once said "Few can confuse Wall
Street as thoroughly as Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan
can."

And Motley Fool radio show included a game called 'What Did the Fed
Chief Say?', where contestants were challenged to interpret snippets
of Greenspan's speeches.

His memoir, titled The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
was published in 2007.

4. MICHAEL E PORTER
==================

Michael E Porter is the Bishop William Laurence University Professor
at the Harvard Business School.

Porter was born in 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.

It is said that Porter has always been obsessed by competition.
Unfortunately, he slipped from the number one position he held in the
2005 list to the fourth position in the 2007 list.

5. GARY HAMEL
=============

The Wall Street Journal has ranked Gary Hamel as the world's most
influential business thinker, and Fortune magazine has called him ?the
world's leading expert on business strategy.? For the last three
years, Hamel has also topped Executive Excellence magazine's annual
ranking of the most sought after management speakers.

Born in 1954, Hamel is a visiting professor at Harvard Business School
and London Business School.

Hamel has worked for companies as diverse as General Electric, Time
Warner, Nokia, Nestle, Shell, Best Buy, Procter & Gamble, 3M, IBM, and
Microsoft.

Hamel's landmark books, Leading the Revolution and Competing for the
Future, have appeared on every management bestseller list and have
been translated into more than 20 languages.

His latest book, The Future of Management, was published by the
Harvard Business School Press in October 2007 and was selected by
Amazon.com as the best business book of the year.

Hamel, a Fellow of the World Economic Forum and the Strategic
Management Society lives in Northern California and believes that
'Dilbert is the bestselling business book of all time.'

6. W CHAN KIM & RENEE MAUBORGNE
===============================

W Chan Kim is co-founder and co-director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean
Strategy Institute and The Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson
Chair Professor of Strategy and International Management at INSEAD,
France.

Prior to joining INSEAD, he was a professor at the University of
Michigan Business School, USA.

He has served as a board member as well as an advisor for a number of
multinational corporations in Europe, the United States and Pacific
Asia. He is an advisory member for the European Union and is the
country advisor to Malaysia. He was born in Korea.

Kim is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum. His Harvard Business
Review articles, co-authored with Renee Mauborgne, are worldwide
bestsellers and have sold over half a million reprints.

Renee Mauborgne is the INSEAD distinguished fellow and a professor of
strategy at INSEAD.

Both Kim and Mauborgne are winners of the Eldridge Haynes Prize,
awarded by the Academy of International Business and the Eldridge
Haynes Memorial Trust of Business International, for the best original
paper in the field of international business.

Their book, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market
Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, published in 2005 has
become an international best seller.

7. THOMAS J PETERS
=================

Tom Peters was born on November 7, 1942 in Baltimore, Maryland. A
writer on business management practices, Peters is best-known for, In
Search of Excellence, co-authored with Robert H. Waterman, Jr.

He went to Severn School for high school and attended Cornell
University, receiving a bachelor's degree in civil engineering in
1965, and a master's degree in 1966.

He then studied business at Stanford Business School, receiving an MBA
and PhD. In 2004, he also received an honorary doctorate from the
State University of Management in Moscow.

From 1974 to 1981, Peters worked as a management consultant at
McKinsey & Company, and then in 1981, he went solo and became an
independent consultant.

According to Peters, excellence in business depends on eight
ingredients.

Activism, with people who 'do it, fix it (and) try it'
Excellent companies 'learn from the people they serve'.
They promote entrepreneurship and autonomy
Management learns from a 'hands-on' approach
Workers are valued as the key to achieve productivity
Excellent companies stick to their knitting, exploiting their core
competencies and not pursuing wild goose chases
They keep their form simple and their staff lean;
They know how to be simultaneously tight-fitting and expansive.
Books that he wrote:

A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference (1985)
Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution (1987)
Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond
Nineties (1992)
The Brand You 50 (1999)

8. JACK WELCH
=============

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of a rail road 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. At age 33 he
became one of the company's youngest general managers and 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.

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'.

Since retiring Jack Welch is busy as a consultant to a number of
Fortune 500 firms. He also wrote his memoirs: Jack: Straight from the
Gut, which was published in 2001; and with Suzy Welch he wrote
Winning: The Ultimate Business How-To Book in 2005.

9. RICHARD BRANSON
==================

Richard Branson was born in 1950 and educated at Stowe School. It was
here that he began to set up Student Magazine when he was just 16. By
17 he'd also set up Student Advisory Centre, which was a charity to
help young people.

In 1970, he founded Virgin as a mail order record retailer, and not
long after he opened a record shop in Oxford Street, London. In 1972,
a recording studio was built in Oxfordshire, and the first Virgin
artist, Mike Oldfield, recorded 'Tubular Bells' which was released in
1973. This album went on to sell over 5 million copies!

Branson's Virgin brand grew rapidly during the 1980s - as he set up
Virgin Atlantic Airways and expanded the Virgin Records music label.

Richard Branson is the 236th richest person according to Forbes' 2008
list of billionaires with an estimated net worth of $7.9 billion.

The eldest and only boy of three children, his sisters are Lindi and
Vanessa. His father Ted was a barrister, and mother, Eve, worked in
the theatre, as a glider pilot instructor and as a flight attendant.

Branson has has dyslexia and thus fared poorly in his studies.

Branson is married to his second wife, Joan Templeman, with whom he
has two children: Holly, a doctor, and Sam Branson.

The couple wed in 1989 at Necker Island, a 74 acre island in the
British Virgin Islands that Branson owns.

He also owns real estate on the Caribbean island of Antigua and
Barbuda.

In 1998 Branson released his autobiography entitled Losing My
Virginity and in Business Stripped Bare.

Branson has guest starred, usually playing himself, on several
television shows, including Friends, Baywatch, Birds of a Feather,
Only Fools and Horses, and The Day Today.

10. JAMES C COLLINS III
===================

Jim Collins was born in in 1958 in Boulder, Colorado. He studied
business at Stanford.

He began his research and teaching career on the faculty at Stanford
University's Graduate School of Business, where he received the
Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992.

In 1995, he founded a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado,
where he now conducts research and teaches executives from the
corporate and social sectors.

Jim has served as a teacher to senior executives and CEOs at over a
hundred corporations.

He has also worked with social sector organisations, such as: Johns
Hopkins Medical School, the Girl Scouts of the USA, the Leadership
Network of Churches, the American Association of K-12 School
Superintendents, and the United States Marine Corps.

In 2005 he published Good to Great. He also authored Beyond
Entrepreneurship: Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company
(1995) and Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
(2004).

In addition, Collins is an avid rock climber.


N.Sukumar
Research Analyst