World's 10 top management gurus
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.
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.
Image: Bill Gates was awarded with a honorary doctorate in medicine at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, on January 23, 2008. Bill and Melinda Gates (not present during the conferment ceremony) were honoured for their work with the global health issues through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. |
Photograph: Anders Wiklund/SCANPIX/AFP/Getty Images 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.
4. MICHAEL E PORTER
Michael E Porter is the Bishop William Laurence University Professor at the Harvard Business School.
5. GARY HAMEL
Hamel has worked for companies as diverse as General Electric, Time Warner, Nokia, Nestle, Shell, Best Buy, Procter & Gamble, 3M, IBM, and Microsoft.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Source :www.Rediff.com 
World's 10 top management gurus 
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