10 MANAGEMENT THINKERS

10 MANAGEMENT THINKERS

C. K. Prahalad

Born: 1941, in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India

Profile: Krishnarao Prahalad is a management consultant, author, and the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.
Contribution: C.K Prahalad co-author of “Competing for the future breakdown strategies for seizing control of your industry and creating the markets of tomorrow.”
Achievement: He is one of the recipients of Pravasi Bharatiya Sammaan awards in 2009 and was conferred the Padma Bhushan the same year.

Bill Gates

Born: October 28, 1955.

Profile: He is an American business magnate, philanthropist, author, and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. He is ranked consistently one of the world's wealthiest people and the wealthiest overall as of 2009. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8 percent of the common stock.

Writing: The Road Ahead,

Awards and honors: Time magazine named Gates one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th century, as well as one of the 100 most influential people of 2004, 2005, and 2006 In 2006, he was voted eighth in the list of "Heroes of our time".Gates has received honorary doctorates from Nyenrode Business Universiteit, Breukelen, The Netherlands, in 2000; the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, in 2002; Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in 2005; Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in April 2007;Harvard University in June 2007; the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, in January 2008, and Cambridge University in June 2009.


Philip Kotler

Born: 27 May 1931 in Chicago

Profile: Philip Kotler is the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Contribution: Kotler has consulted many major U.S. and foreign companies, including IBM, Michelin, Bank of America, Merck, General Electric, Honeywell, and Motorola—in the areas of marketing strategy, planning and organization, and international marketing. He presents seminars in major international cities around the world on the latest marketing developments to companies and other organizations.
Achievement: Philip Kotler was selected in 2001 as the 4 major management guru by the Financial Times (behind Jack Welch, Bill Gates, and Peter Drucker,) and has been hailed by the Management Centre Europe as "the world's foremost expert on the strategic practice of marketing." In 2008, the Wall Street Journal listed him as the 6th most influential person on business thinking.
Dr. Gary P. Hamel
Born: Woodside, California
Profile: Hamel is an American management expert. He is a founder of Strategos, an international management consulting firm based in Chicago.
Contribution: Gary Hamel is the originator (with C. K. Prahalad) of the concept of core competencies. He is also the director of the Woodside Institute, a nonprofit research foundation based in Woodside, California.He is a visiting Professor of Strategic Management at London Business School. He was formerly a Visiting Professor of International Business at the University of Michigan (PhD 1990) and at Harvard Business School.
Awards and honors: Leading the Revolution, in which he had written a very positive profile of Enron.
Michael Porter
Born: In 1947
Profile: Michael Eugene Porter is a University Professor at Harvard Business School, with academic interests in management and economics
Contribution: Michael Porter is the founder of a nonprofit organization called the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City and one of the founders of The Monitor Group. His main academic objectives focus on how a firm or a region can build a competitive advantage and develop competitive strategy. One of his most significant contributions is the five forces.Porter's strategic system consists primarily of:
• Porter's Five Forces Analysis
• strategic groups (also called strategic sets)
• the value chain
• the generic strategies of cost leadership, product differentiation, and focus
• the market positioning strategies of variety based, needs based, and access based market positions
• global strategy
• Porter's clusters of competence for regional economic development
• Diamond model
Awards and honors: Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer's latest article and winner of the 2006 McKinsey Award for the Best Harvard Business Review Article.
Peter Michael Senge
Born: 1947
Profile: He is an American scientist and director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is known as author of the book The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization from 1990 (new edition of 2007). He is a senior lecturer at the System Dynamics Group at MIT Sloan School of Management, and co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute.
Contribution: An engineer by training, Peter was a protegé of John H. Hopkins and has followed closely the works of Michael Peters and Robert Fritz and based his books on pioneering works with the five disciplines in Ford, Chrysler, Shell, AT&T, Hannover Insurance, Harley-Davidson since the 70s and 80s through today.
Awards and honors: The Fifth Discipline is one of his most popular books with over one million copies sold. Peter Senge and the Learning Organization at the Infed Website
Alvin Toffler
Born: October 3, 1928
Profile: He is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communications revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity. A former associate editor of Fortune magazine, his early work focused on technology and its impact (through effects like information overload). Then he moved to examining the reaction of and changes in society. His later focus has been on the increasing power of 21st century military hardware, weapons and technology proliferation, and capitalism
Contribution: In his book The Third Wave Toffler describes three types of societies, based on the concept of 'waves' - each wave pushes the older societies and cultures aside.
Awards and honors: He has been described in the Financial Times as the "world's most famous futurologist".
Richard Branson
Born: 18 July 1950
Profile: He is an English industrialist, best known for his Virgin brand of over 360 companies. Branson's first successful business venture was at age 16, when he published a magazine called Student.
Awards and honors: He was knighted in 1999 for his "services to entrepreneurship".[44][45] In 2000, Branson received the Tony Jannus Award for his accomplishments in commercial air transportation.
Ram Charan
Born: In 1939 in Uttar Pradesh, India
Profile: He is a business consultant, speaker, and writer.
Contribution: Charan has consulted for many well-known companies such as GE, KLM, and Bank of America. He is the author of various popular books on business, including Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times, Boards That Deliver, What The CEO Wants You To Know, Boards At Work, Every Business Is A Growth Business (with Noel Tichy), Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business, Confronting Reality,Know How and Execution (with Larry Bossidy and Charles Burck), which was a best-seller.
Awards and honors: Charan was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources in 2000 and named a Distinguished Fellow in 2005. He is also a director of Austin Industries.
Paul Michael Romer
Born: 1955
Profile: He is an economist and Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Development and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is considered an expert on economic growth.
Contribution: Paul Romer's most important work is in the field of economic growth. Economists studied long-run growth extensively during the 1950s and 1960s. The work of Robert Solow, for example, established the primacy of technological progress in accounting for sustained increases in output per worker. Romer's work in the 1980s and 1990s amounted to constructing mathematical representations of economies in which technological change is the result of the intentional actions of people, such as research and development.
Awards and honors: Romer was named one of America's 25 most influential people by Time Magazine in 1997[1], and in 2000 started the online educational company Aplia. He has been awarded the Horst Claus Recktenwald Prize in Economics in Nuremberg, Germany. Romer is the son of former Colorado Governor Roy Romer.
Peter Drucker
Profile: He (November 19, 1909–November 11, 2005) was a writer, management consultant, and self-described “social ecologist.” His books and scholarly and popular articles explored how humans are organized across the business, government and the nonprofit sectors of society.
Contribution: His writings have predicted many of the major developments of the late twentieth century, including privatization and decentralization; the rise of Japan to economic world power; the decisive importance of marketing; and the emergence of the information society with its necessity of lifelong learning. In 1959, Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker" and later in his life considered knowledge work productivity to be the next frontier of management.
Awards and honors: Drucker was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President George W. Bush on July 9, 2002[1]. He also received honors from the governments of Japan and Austria. He was the Honorary Chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, now the Leader to Leader Institute, from 1990 through 2002. In 1969 he was awarded New York University’s highest honor, the NYU Presidential Citation.
James G. March
Born: 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio
Profile: He is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, best known for his research on organizations and organizational decision making.
Contribution: The scope of his academic work is broad, but focused on understanding how decisions happen in individuals, groups, organizations, companies and society. He explores factors that influences decision making, such as risk orientation, leadership and the ambiguity of the present and the past; politics and vested interests by stakeholders; the challenges of giving and receiving advice; the challenges of organizational and individual learning and the challenges of balancing exploration and exploitation in organizations.
Awards and honors: He has received numerous teaching awards. He interacts and communicates in many different forms as books, articles, interactive seminars, films and poetry.
Vijay Govindarajan
Probile: Vijay Govindarajan, known as VG, is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School of Business and founding director of Tuck's Center for Global Leadership. He is also the faculty co-director for Global Leadership 2020, Tuck's executive education program that focuses on global management and is taught on three continents.
Contribution: Govindarajan currently writes a column for FastCompany.com. His articles have also appeared in journals such as Harvard Business Review, strategy+business, California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Decision Sciences, and Journal of Business Strategy. One of his papers, co-authored with Professor Anil K. Gupta, was recognized as one of the ten most-often cited articles in the entire 40-year history of Academy of Management Journal. Govindarajan has published six books, including The Quest for Global Dominance (co-authored with Anil K. Gupta,Jossey-Bass, 2001). He is a popular keynote speaker and has been featured at such conferences as the Business Week CEO Forum and The Economist Conference.
Achievement: He was awarded the President's Gold Medal for his outstanding performance in obtaining the first rank.
Shiv Khera
Profile: He is an Indian motivational speaker, author of self-help books, business consultant, activist and politician.
Contribution: Khera has been delivering motivational lectures for more than ten years, primarily in India, US and Singapore. He has spoken in seminars, workshops and as keynote speaker in conferences. He has developed a three-day workshop called Blueprint for Success, which focuses on "the key areas of MAALTS (motivation, attitude, ambition, leadership, teamwork and self-esteem)". In addition, Khera also conducts in-house workshops on time and stress management, customer service, platform skills and improving sales.
Awards and honors: He has been recognized as a "Louis Marchesi Fellow" by the Round Table Foundation. Lions Club International gave him a "Lifetime Achievement Award" for the cause of 'Humanitarian Service to the Society'. He has also received the Rotary Club's "Centennial Vocational Award for Excellence."
Gita Piramal
Born: around 1954
Profile: He is a renowned media personality, freelance writer, business historian, managing editor of The Smart Manager magazine, Director of BP Ergo and former director of VIP Industries Limited.
Contribution: Gita worked as a Bombay correspondent for Financial Times from 1988 to 1992. Gita Piramal had worked as the Associate Dean for Indian School of Business's publishing arm She has also worked as Member LBS Regional Advisory Board. She has been working as managing editor of The Smart Manager, a management magazine, based at Mumbai, since 2002. She has written for many years on the corporate sector for leading Indian and international publications such as the Financial Times and the Economic Times and is a consulting editor of the World Executive’s Digest. She also has been involved in the making of television programmes on Indian business for the BBC and Plus Channel.

Awards and honors: Gita had received 'Business Today Award' for being one of India's 25 most powerful women in 2004. She also received the Scholar of the Year 2004 award from Ness Wadia College, Pune, India. Her two books have been adjudged as best management book by Delhi Management Association.