8 Indians amongst world's top management gurus

Who shapes the future of global business? The executives in the boardroom, the shareholders or the business gurus?

According to the the Thinkers 50 list, published once every two years, management innovators and business professors are the real thinkers.

These are people known little to the general public but revered throughout the business world.

In 2009 C K Prahalad, the Indian-born professor of corporate strategy at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business was the winner. this year eight Indians feature in this list.

So who is the most influential business thinker on earth right now?

Click on NEXT to find out...

Clayton M Christensen

2011 Ranking: 1
Winner: 2011 Thinkers50 Innovation Award

Christensen is the Kim B Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost experts on innovation and growth.

He is the bestselling author of a number of books and his writings have won a number of awards, including five McKinsey Awards for articles published in the Harvard Business Review.

Christensen became a faculty member at the Harvard Business School in 1992.

In 2000, Christensen founded Innosight, a consulting firm that uses his theories to help companies create new growth businesses.

There are joint winners for rank 2. Click on NEXT to read...

W Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne

2011 Ranking: 2
Winner: 2011 Thinkers50 Strategy Award

Kim and Mauborgne are professors of strategy and management at INSEAD, and co-directors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute in Fontainebleau, France.

They are the authors of the worldwide bestselling strategy book Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant.

Their research that looked at more than 150 strategic moves over a 100-year period and in over 30 industries, and has since been extended to include not-for-profit organizations, the public sector, and entire countries.

Kim and Mauborgne have also authored a number of highly influential Harvard Business Review articles.

Their Value Innovation and Fair Process articles were selected as among the best classic articles ever published in Harvard Business Review.

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Vijay Govindarajan

2011 Ranking: 3
Winner: 2011 Breakthrough Idea Award

Govindarajan, known as VG, is the Earl C Daum 1924 professor of international business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

He is one of the world's leading experts on strategy and innovation.

Govindarajan has published nine books including international bestsellers Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators and The Other Side of Innovation.

His most recent book, The Other Side of Innovation focuses on how to turn an innovative idea into a successful commercial business.

Govindarajan is also responsible for posing the question that sparked a global challenge to build a $300 house.

Click on NEXT for the other 7 Indians on the list....

Nitin Nohria

2011 Ranking: 13

Nohria is the dean of Harvard Business School.

Prior to his appointment as dean, Nohria served in a number of senior positions at HBS including co-chair of the Leadership Initiative; senior associate dean of faculty development; and head of the organisational behavior unit.

Particular areas of research interest and expertise include motivation; leadership; corporate transformation and accountability; and sustainable economic and human performance.

Nohria is the author, co-author or co-editor of 16 books and over 50 journal articles, book chapters and working papers.

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Nirmalya Kumar

2011 Ranking: 26
Winner: 2011 Thinkers50 Global Village Award

Kumar is a professor of marketing at London Business School, where he is also co-director of the Aditya Birla India Center.
His work focuses on marketing and the rise of India as an economic force.

Kumar is the author of several books.

More recently, he has written about India and its rise to economic superpower status.

In India's Global Powerhouses: How They Are Taking on the World (2009), Kumar provides an insider's guide to doing business with Indian leaders and companies.

A keen collector of the work of Indian artist Jamini Roy, Kumar is said to have the largest collection of Roy paintings outside India.

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Pankaj Ghemawat

2011 Ranking: 27
Winner: 2011 Thinkers50 Book Award

Ghemawat is the Anselmo Rubiralta Professor of Global Strategy at IESE Business School, in Spain.

Prior to that he was the youngest full professor ever appointed at Harvard Business School.

Best known for his work on globalisation, Ghemawat's books include Games businesses play: Cases and models (1997); Creating value through international strategy (2005); Redefining global strategy; Crossing borders in a world where differences still matter (2007); and Strategy and the business landscape (2009).

He refutes the idea that there is a single global economy. We live, he says, in a semi-globalized world at best.

Regional differences exist and matter, argues Ghemawat, and the unevenness and differences that exist from region to region are a potential source of commercial advantage.

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Vineet Nayar

2011 Ranking: 40
Shortlisted: 2011 Thinkers50 Book Award

Nayar is the vice chairman and CEO of HCL Technologies, a global information technology services company based in India.

Nayar's success has been fuelled by his unconventional management philosophy of putting his employees first, and customers second.

By making management accountable to the employees, he has driven HCL to greater success, a journey related in his book Employees First, Customers Second (2010) in which he details how he set about his management revolution.

Among his less conventional management techniques, Nayar makes a point of dancing at the company's employee wide Direction event, both on stage and among the crowd. It helps to remove the barriers between employee and CEO, he says.

Under Nayar, HCL has won awards for best employer and most influential up and coming company.

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Rakesh Khurana

2011 Ranking: 41

Khurana is the Marvin Bower professor of leadership development at the Harvard Business School.

Khurana's main areas of interest are concerned with macro-organizational theory and the dynamics of executive labor markets, and he is particularly well known for his work on leadership and CEOs.

The author and editor of four books, and many articles on the executive labour markets and management education, Khurana is probably best known for Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs.

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Sheena Iyengar

2011 Ranking: 48

Iyengar is the S T Lee Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, and research director of the Jerome A Chazen Institute of International Business.

Iyengar is best known for her work on choice. She received the Best Dissertation Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 1998, for her dissertation, "Choice and Its Discontents."

Iyengar's award winning book, The Art of Choosing was published in 2010.

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Subir Chowdhury

2011 Ranking: 50

Chowdhury is chairman and CEO of ASI Consulting Group and a globally respected quality expert and strategist.

He advises CEOs and senior leaders of Fortune 100 companies as well as organizations in the public, private and not-for profit sectors all over the world, helping them make quality a part of their business culture.

His book The Ice Cream Maker (2005) is a business novella about Pete and the ice cream factory he manages; in which he introduces the next generation management system - LEO - Listen, Enrich and Optimize.

Now let's take a look at the 8 others who complete the list of 10. Click on NEXT...

Jim Collins

2011 Ranking: 4

Collins, a former Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty member, founded a management laboratory in his hometown of Boulder, Colorado in 1995.

He is best known for his books on what makes companies long-lived and great.

His latest book, Great by Choice (written with Morten Hansen), published in October 2011, seeks to understand why some companies thrive in unstable environments while others falter.

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Michael Porter

2011 Ranking: 5
Shortlisted: 2011 Strategy Award
Winner: 2005 Thinkers50

Porter is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School, and one of the most influential management thinkers of his generation.

Porter is considered by many to be the father of modern corporate strategy.

Porter's Five Forces Framework is taught in every business school in the world.

The author of 18 books and over 125 articles, Porter co-founded the Monitor Group in 1983.

Many of Porter's ideas have entered mainstream management practice.

More recently, Porter has examined the interaction between competition and society.

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Roger Martin

2011 Ranking: 6
Shortlisted: 2011 Thinkers50 Book Award
Shortlisted: 2011 Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award

Martin is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Canada.

He is best known for his work on integrative thinking as a means of solving complex problems.

He lists his other research interests as business design, corporate social responsibility, and country competitiveness.

The author of 12 Harvard Business Review articles, Martin's best-known book is The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking.

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Marshall Goldsmith

2011 Ranking: 7
Winner: 2011 Thinkers50 Leadership Award

Goldsmith is one of the world's leading executive coaches.

He was a pioneer of the 360-degree feedback technique. His success is built on a no-nonsense approach to leaders and leadership and a Buddhist philosophy.

Over the years, Goldsmith has maintained a prodigious output as author, co-author, and editor, of more than 30 books.

Goldsmith received his MBA from Indiana University and his doctorate from UCLA. Between 1976 and 2000 he was assistant professor and associate dean in the business college of Loyola Marymount College, Los Angeles.

Since then he has taught executive education at Dartmouth College's Tuck Business School and other leading universities.

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Marcus Buckingham

2011 Ranking: 8
Shortlisted: 2011 Thinkers50 Leadership Award

Buckingham is best known for his work on "strengths" - the idea that it is more productive to focus on a person's strengths rather than their weaknesses.

He is the founder and CEO of the eponymous Marcus Buckingham Company.

Buckingham is the author or co-author of seven bestselling books.

His latest book, StandOut, (2011) is published with an online personal assessment, to help readers identify their top "strength roles" which, when combined, reveal their "edge" as a leader.

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Don Tapscott

2011 Ranking: 9
Shortlisted: 2011 Thinkers50 Book Award
Shortlisted: 2011 Thinkers50 Global Village Award

Tapscott is an adjunct professor of management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and is one of the world's leading authorities on innovation, media, globalisation and the economic and social impact of technology on business and society.

The author or co-author of 14 books, Tapscott wrote the 1992 best seller Paradigm Shift.

When he is not being a cyber-guru you might find Tapscott playing keyboards in Toronto-based band Men in Suits.

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Malcolm Gladwell

2011 Ranking: 10

Gladwell is an award winning staff writer for the New Yorker magazine.

He is also the author of several best-selling books.

Gladwell's books have earned him many plaudits, including a placing in Time Magazine's list of the 100 Most Influential People In the Business World.