The Top 50 Business Intellectuals

In May 2002 Accenture's Institute for Strategic Change released a ranking of significant "business intellectuals". While many of those listed are not typically connected to "business" and while others would not be regarded by some as "intellectuals", "the list is sure to cause some discussion around the water coolers of the business world". For that reason we provide a basic list here and a link to more details about the Accenture study.
The rankings will form part of a larger work by Tom Davenport and Laurence Prusak that is to be released in book form by the Harvard Business School Press. Basically, these authors used the three criteria first established in Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline : 1) web hits using Google; 2) Media hits using Lexis/Nexis and 3) scholarly citations using the Science and Social Science Citation Indexes. Using this methodology, Tom Porter is ranked at number one. There are two Canadians on the list ( Henry Mintzberg and Don Tapscott) and two women ( Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Esther Dyson).
The basic list appears immediately below and at the bottom, there is a link that provides more details about the methodology and the intellectuals. For your convenience we have provided links to our catalogue that will direct you quickly to books by each of those in the rankings (if they have published books and we have them). In some cases we have provided a link to a biographical profile if we have already completed one about the author elsewhere on our web site. Articles about each person will be easily found by searching databases like: Lexis/Nexis; ProQuest ABI/Inform Global or Factiva.

* Note: Authors with an asterisk * have an associated complete biographical page available on the Business Library web site

1. Michael Porter	26. John Seely Brown
2. Tom Peters	27. George Gilder
3. Robert Reich	28. Kevin Kelly
4. * Peter Drucker	29. * Chris Argyris
5. Peter Senge	30. Robert S. Kaplan
6. Gary S. Becker	31. Esther Dyson
7. Gary Hamel	32. Edward De Bono
8. Alvin Toffler	33. Jack Welch
9. Hal Varian	34. John Kotter
10. Daniel Goleman	35. Ken Blanchard
11. * Rosabeth Moss Kanter	36. Edward Tufte
12. Ronald Coase	37. Kenichi Ohmae
13. Lester Thurow	38. * Alfred Chandler
14. * Charles Handy	39. James MacGregor Burns
15. * Henry Mintzberg	40. Sumantra Ghoshal
16. Michael Hammer	41. Edgar Schein
17. Stephen Covey	42. Myron S. Scholes
18. Warren Bennis	43. James March
19. Bill Gates	44. Richard Branson
20. Jeffrey Pfeffer	45. Anthony Robbins
21. Philip Kotler	46. * Clay(ton) Christensen
22. Robert C. Merton	47. Michael Dell
23. C. K. Prahalad	48. John Naisbitt
24. Thomas H. Davenport	49. David Teece
25. Don Tapscott	50. Don Peppers

Complete Accenture study