Top 50 Thinkers: Tomorrow's Ideas, Today
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anagement gets a bad press. Entrepreneurs and leaders are enthusiastically celebrated, but managers are often ignored. This is fundamentally wrong. Management is the essential lubricant of any organisation — however large or small, whatever sector it might be in, wherever it is located.
Without management nothing gets done. Period.
Management is timeless and universal. It took management to build the Taj Mahal and to tend the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It takes management for any of the great Indian multinationals of today to survive and thrive.
And increasingly it is realised that management can offer a competitive advantage. Work by Gary Hamel and Julian Birkinshaw of MLab proves that innovative management can mark out the corporate winners from the losers.
This means that fresh thinking on management is enthusiastically sought out by managers throughout the world. Managers realise that management ideas can offer a vital source of differentiation.
This, partly, explains why the Thinkers50, our biennial ranking of management thinkers, is enthusiastically sought out by practitioners. They want to know the best source of tomorrow’s agenda-changing ideas. The Thinkers50 2011 is a guide to which thinkers and ideas are in — and which have been consigned to business history.
According to the Thinkers50, the most influential living management thinker in the world is Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School. Christensen, the author of several best-selling books including The Innovator’s Dilemma, tops the list for the first time and follows in the footsteps of the previous winners Peter Drucker, Michael Porter and C.K. Prahalad.
Christensen’s influence on the business world has been profound. In The Innovator’s Dilemma, he looked at why companies struggle with radical innovation in their markets. The book introduced the idea of disruptive technologies and disruptive innovation to a generation of managers. The innovator’s dilemma is that the very management practices that have allowed them to become industry leaders also make it hard for companies to develop the disruptive technologies that ultimately steal away their markets.
More recently, Christensen has applied his ideas to healthcare and education to show how enlightened management thinking can tackle the big issues facing society. Christensen also picked up the 2011 Thinkers50 Innovation Award.
At second place in the 2011 ranking are the INSEAD professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. Kim and Mauborgne, Korean and American, respectively, are the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy and a string of highly influential Harvard Business Review articles. Blue Ocean Strategy has sold over two million copies, and has been embraced by companies, not-for-profits and national governments around the world. In 2010, for example, the government of Malaysia launched the third wave of its National Blue Ocean Strategy. A key target is building rural infrastructure — providing housing and water supplies for the rural poor.
There is nothing as practical as a good theory. This really is the point of the Thinkers50. No one exemplifies this more than the Indian-born thinker Vijay Govindarajan. VG, as he is better known, is a professor at the Tuck School of Business in New Hampshire. In 2008, Govindarajan joined General Electric (GE) for 24 months as the company’s first Professor in Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant. He is the originator (with GE CEO Jeff Immelt, and Chris Trimble) of the concept of reverse innovation — where innovation takes place in emerging markets and then is brought back into developed countries. Reverse innovation is rated by the Harvard Business Review as one of the 10 big ideas of the decade.
An August 2010 blog by Govindarajan and Christian Sarkar challenging designers to create a house for $300 set off a campaign to reinvent housing for the world’s poorest people — which earned Govindarajan the C.K. Prahalad Breakthrough Idea Award.
This is an example of the powerful impact of so many of the thinkers on the Thinkers50. We do not argue that all are intent on changing the world. They tend not to be idealists. But they are committed to improving the quality of management. Without effective and inspired management we will not be able to overcome the challenges of the future.
Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove are adjunct professors at IE Business School. Stuart is editor of Business Strategy Review. Des is an associate fellow of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School
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