From time to time I am asked to review a book by a publisher, an author or someone who is thinking about using a book for a particular purpose. The Thinkers50 is such a book. I would probably not have read and reviewed this book otherwise.

I promised I would review this book from the point of view of a Business Studies teacher and student. Following on from this, the review splits itself into two distinct sections:

In terms of content it is poor, very poor; and a lot of that content is either to be found free of charge on the book's own web site or can easily be inferred from it
In terms of the book's usefulness as a resource and as a spur to further study, it's good.

There, bets fully hedged and one very good aspect of this book, although it's bound to sound harsh however I say it, is that it contains only living thinkers. That's good news because it's high time that business studies teachers and examiners moved away from Maslow, Taylor and the rest and into the more modern world. Not that those old stagers didn't say anything valuable, they did.

Having said what I've said about the content already, I don't want to dwell on that aspect of the book: I wouldn't spend £9.99 of my money on it. I am going to set the scene a little by looking at a few aspects of the book and its construction but then will spend some time looking at just three of the thinkers to be found in the Thinkers50: 50 people is too many to review, three is enough to give you a flavour of what you might do with the book.

Before I start, let me ask you to write down who, in your opinion, is the world's most influential living management thinker: it's your opinion, include who you like, no holds barred. You can compare your choice with the 50 people on the list in this book later.

If you feel you need help in making your selection, go here and see the criteria that they used to put together The Thinkers50. Those criteria include these ideas, there are seven more criteria

1 ORIGINALITY OF IDEAS Are the ideas and examples used by the thinker original?
2 PRACTICALITY OF IDEAS Have the ideas promoted by the thinker been implemented in organizations? And, has the implementation been successful?
3 PRESENTATION STYLE How proficient is the thinker at presenting his/her ideas orally?

The Thinkers50 concept is devised by Suntop Media a training and consulting company. Its training focuses on developing writing and media skills. Its consulting focuses on enabling organisations and individuals to maximise their thought leadership. Peculiarly for a business that is trying to generate such a high profile, it's web site is dated 2005 and on one page it is still talking about doing something in 2005 as if 2005 is in the future!

Where does the list come from? Again from the Thinkers50 web site:

Over the last two years, visitors to the Thinkers 50 website (www.thinkers50.com) have been providing their answers. The Thinkers 50 team also emailed hundreds of business people, consultants, academics and MBA students throughout the world. After sifting through more than 1,200 votes a list of contenders was compiled.

The result was a short-list of 80 names. A Google search was then undertaken to establish the number of references for each of those on the list, and factored into the ranking. Finally, they were assessed against 10 criteria.

Each guru was marked against the criteria that I highlighted above.

Who, then, are these people?

Kjell NORDSTRÖM & Jonas RIDDERSTRÅLE
Chan KIM & Renée MAUBORGNE
Robert KAPLAN & David NORTON

I have taken those peoples' names from the book and they are ranked at 9, 15 and 22 respectively.

No? Well, if you are a regular visitor to my site you might have heard about Kaplan and Norton, otherwise I think the others would be a mystery to you.

Do you consider the following people to be thinkers?

Sir Richard Branson
Steven Covey
Scott Adams

I have taken those peoples' names from the book and they are ranked at 11, 18 and 12 respectively.

OK, so you do think they are thinkers ... so define thinking then in the context of this book.

Who is at the top of the pile? Michael E Porter. I suppose that this is no surprise and it might even be the "right" answer. Who is at the bottom of the pile? Why, it's Geoffrey Moore: you know Geoff, he's that high technology marketing guru who identified the Technology Adaptation Life Cycle (TALC). Then he wrote a few books that you've probably read: Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game and Living on the Fault Line. Forgive my cynicism as Moore is probably a lot better known, richer and wiser than I am but I do wonder how he got to be in the top fifty really.

My first problem with this book, then, is the method by which the top fifty were chosen: a non random and possibly non representative sample of around 1,200 people started it off ...

In the book, every thinker is tagged with a word or phrase that is meant to summarise who they are or what they do. With slight amendments by me to some of the words they use, impudent I know, here is my tally of what these thinkers do:

Title/Job	Number of Thinkers
Educator	21
Author	4
Businessman	8
Consultant	11
Journalist	3
Psychologist	1
Economist	2

Using this book

1 All of that gives you pause for thought and as an exercise for teachers and students, especially the older and wiser of our students, you could set them the question: who is the most influential living management thinker ... to make their lives easier, you could provide them with the latest Thinkers50's list, presented in alphabetical order, to ensure that they can choose someone whom they at least have heard of.

If you are teaching or working at undergraduate and post graduate level, don't give them the list, encourage them to use their own knowledge and experience.

2 Scour the profiles of each thinker for clues relating to why the laureates have been nominated. Some will be obvious and others won't. Sir Richard Branson as a thinker? Erm, major entrepreneurial adventurer but not a thinker. Jeff Bezos a thinker? Well, he's just had the one idea that I'm aware of, setting up amazon.com and despite what it says in the book about him and amazon, he's still only surviving by the skin of his teeth.

Business and management is a fickle area of study too as Tom Peters (thinker number 4) demonstrates and as Peter Drucker has freely admitted. Peters reads the business news wires and cobbles them together in a series of threads and then says things like Wow! and Excellence! People buy his books in their droves only to find that he's just written another book. Drucker, who sadly died last November so is now permanently disqualified from the thinkers 50 bemoans the fadists: me too! Drucker was thinker number 1 in both of the first two thinkers 50 lists and I'm sure he would have headed this latest one too.

Three of the Fifty: I'm going to look at what we can learn about the top three thinkers now both by using the book and by using some of the other sources suggested by the book

Thinker 1: Michael Porter ... he's almost a living legend, has written 18 books and countless articles, consults widely with the Monitor Group, above all he is an educator.

Porter's books include Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, Competitive Advantage, The Competitive Advantage of Nations and Can Japan Compete?.

Every profile in the book contains a link to a web page so let's look at the link for Porter to see where it leads: in this case, we are led to Porter's profile on the Harvard Business School and unlike many of the links provided in this book, this one is not that illuminating. It's fine and you can use this to garner some useful information about Porter and his work.

In this case, I clicked on the link to The Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness: this is a comprehensive site and although much of the materials listed here are for sale there is still a lot that poor teachers and students can learn free of charge. Please note that some of the links are now dead so be prepared to be a little disappointed because of that: there is still a huge amount to marvel at, however. Some links take us to places where we need to register to continue: if that's a problem for you then you will be disappointed again, I wasn't as I am a registration freak as I am prepared to take a look at many things in order to sort the wheat from the chaff.

For example, I found a synopsis of an article in the Harvard Business Review that Porter wrote with two others: Seven Surprises for New CEOs (co authors are Jay W Lorsch, and Nitin Nohria and it was published in the Harvard Business Review in October 2004). The synopsis is at this page and says this:

As a newly minted CEO, you may think you finally have the power to set strategy, the authority to make things happen, and full access to the finer points of your business. But if you expect the job to be as simple as that, you're in for an awakening. Even though you bear full responsibility for your company's well-being, you are a few steps removed from many of the factors that drive results. You have more power than anybody else in the corporation, but you need to use it with extreme caution. In their workshops for new CEOs, held at Harvard Business School in Boston, the authors have discovered that nothing--not even running a large business within the company--fully prepares a person to be the chief executive.

The seven most common surprises are:

• You can't run the company.
• Giving orders is very costly.
• It is hard to know what is really going on.
• You are always sending a message.
• You are not the boss.
• Pleasing shareholders is not the goal.
• You are still only human.

a) These surprises carry some important and subtle lessons. First, you must learn to manage organizational context rather than focus on daily operations. Second, you must recognize that your position does not confer the right to lead, nor does it guarantee the loyalty of the organization. Finally, you must remember that you are subject to a host of limitations, even though others might treat you as omnipotent. How well and how quickly you understand, accept, and confront the seven surprises will have a lot to do with your success or failure as a CEO.

As a starting point of a discussion of what CEOs do, I think this is good, even though it's just a synopsis. You can extend your review of these ideas as there is a link to Jay Lorsch discussing this article here. Lorsch is asked by the interviewer to explain each of the seven surprises one by one. Well worth listening to!

c) Now do a web search for Porter and see what turns up. I took the opportunity of taking a look at Google Book Search for Michael E Porter and found 28,100 pages to look at. Is this a valuable thing to do? Yes, without doubt, although anyone hoping to put off going to the library or the bookshop is bound to be disappointed as even Google's Book Search doesn't give us access to more than just a few pages for each of the books it chooses to highlight.

I clicked on the first link to the first book in the Book Search and was presented with contents page of the book Strategy that Porter wrote along with Cynthia A Montgomery. Useful? Not really.

The second link gave me the contents page of Porter's own On Competition. Useful? Not for me.

Let's try one more link ... in this case the task falls away because Porter is so famous and so well quoted that very quickly the books we are presented with are not Porter's own. The books contain lots of references to Porter's work but not a lot by the man himself.

Sorry but I think this resource would take a lot of effort to be useful in Porter's case.

b) I don't want to steal Porter's thunder; but Jay Lorsch is a very famous person within the context of business and management in his own right ... find out what he is famous for!

Thinker 2: Bill Gates ... again, Gates as a thinker? Hmm, not for me. A bit like Branson in that he is clearly an entrepreneur of significant merit but I have yet to felt in awe of anything he has thought. It was Gates, after all, who announced that 640,000 bytes of memory would be perfectly adequate for us all ... the computer I'm using now has 1,000,000,000 bytes of memory and I could still use more! Then again, if computer developers had stuck at the DOS induced 640 Kb limit of old, they might have been much more efficient and creative in their use of our memories!

Does Gates have anything useful to say to us, though? Yes, of course. Gates has always had quite a lot to say about strategy ... he has isolated six things that a company should do to achieve success in any market. It should 1. Concentrate on a market with big potential and few competitors 2. Get in early and go in big 3. Set up a proprietary position 4. Protect that position using every method available 5. Aim for high gross margins or the highest available 6. Make customers an offer they find hard, if not impossible, to refuse
Gates: thinker number 2

If you're looking for convenient lists, why not take this one from Gates. Based on e for electronic, as in email, ecommerce, ebook, here are five ethings

Gates has always sought to inject the organisation with vital components. There are five, all of which begin with the letter ‘E’:

• Enrichment: employees are attracted by high salaries and retained through generous option schemes
• Egalitarianism
• Empowerment
• E-mail
• Emphasis on Performance: employees’ performances are assessed twice-yearly. They receive a mark on a one-to-five scale. A ‘four’ is extraordinarily good: a ‘one’ means they’re fired.

Gates: thinker number 2

Question: 1 a) do you agree that employees are attracted by high salaries and retained through generous option schemes? Find evidence both for and against that assertion.
b) do these five components comprise everything that a company should inject into itself? Think of three more components (hint: they don't have to begin with the letter 'e' but if they do that's even better; and there are no single perfect answers here).

2 The book says (page 50) that Gates is not a management guru in the sense of the others. Discuss what you think Parker means by that statement.

Now let's take a look at the web link provided on page 50 of the book.

Interested in what Gates has to say about reading? Take a look at this page: Beyond Gutenberg by Bill Gates. Reprinted from "The World in 2000," a publication of The Economist Group.

Question 3 a) what is a p-book?
Set out the development of reading technologies as Gates sees it as you attempt to follow Gates' line of reasoning. Then from a marketing point of view, attempt to assess the market for e-books, p-books and possible alternatives to the book over the coming 50 years.

Let's do something a little different now since Gates tends to talk about what he knows the best: technology. This is at least partly why he can't be considered a management guru, of course. Take a look at this page Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation WinHEC "Advancing the Platform" Seattle, Washington May 23, 2006. Scroll down to where Gates makes his entrance and read on: it's geeky but interesting as it's relevant to forecasting, business trends, the application of technology, the development and testing of systems and so on ... all relevant to business and management.

But now, click on the Multimedia Resources links at the top of the page and take a look at how the head of the world's major technology company communicates his ideas ... yes, communication is a business and management topic too.

Question 4: Try to establish Gates' audience and assess whether his message is being appropriately delivered.

The Presentation also includes materials from another speaker, Jeff Woolsey; but you can treat it as if it's all being done by one person unless you think Woolsey's style is radically different from Gates'.

There is a section of the Bill Gates web site entitled Executive email. Let's look at that now: click here to start at the Archive. I then decided to look at an email that was prepared by someone other than Gates: click here to see what Jeff Raikes (Group Vice President of Microsoft’s Productivity and Business Services Group) has to say about productivity.

Raikes says, Our goal is ambitious – to improve personal, team and organizational productivity by addressing a broad array of business processes. We're both excited by the opportunity and pleased with the results to date.

Question 5 a) assess why Raikes concentrates on what he calls Effective Virtual Teams. What are such teams and how will they operate?
b) What is XML and why does it seem to be such a vital aspect of the productivity revolution?
c) Raikes says that, In short, the end of innovation is nowhere near. Explain what Raikes meant by that remark

There is a great deal more that I could have used of Gates' materials but the links I have given are the starting point for you to be able to do that for yourselves: he talks a lot and he has a lot to say!

Now, hands up if you have honestly, really, genuinely heard of thinker 3: CK Prahalad. Honestly?

CK stands for Coimbatore Krishnao Prahalad and he was born in India in 1941. I have read several of Prahalad's articles but I haven't read any of his books but there is a lot on the internet about him and, of course, Thinkers50 has a link to a web site to start us off. Well, not exactly start us off as it's a very thin site indeed: just a tiny bit about CK and his associates at The Next Practice (TNP).

According to itself, TNP is a unique advisory firm. We work with clients to develop the new business models, products and partnerships that are required to secure large growth opportunities in emerging markets. Our focus is innovation in emerging markets at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. Source.

It's the bottom of the pyramid or BOP that I'll concentrate on now: look at the Thinkers50 chapter on Prahalad and you will see that the BOP idea is central to their view of him.

Prahalad maintains a deep interest in the world’s poor. This led him to write The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (2004) ... He identified the world’s poor (the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ or BOP) as a potential untapped market for companies, worth anything up to $13 trillion a year. “The real source of market promise is not the wealthy few in the developing world, or even the emerging middle-income consumers. It is the billions of aspiring poor who are joining the market economy for the first time.” A market at the bottom of the pyramid could be co-created by multi-national and domestic industry, non-governmental organisations, and most importantly the poor themselves. They would then have choice over their lives and the products they used. He pointed to Hindustan Lever’s success in marketing soap-powder and detergents in smaller, cheaper units. Source, also to be found on page 130 of the book.

I did a search of the web for Prahalad and came across a wide variety of pages, including one from FastCompany.com. This page discusses Prahalad's setting up of a company called Praja with a colleague. Praja is Sanskrit for nobility ... erm, no, it's Sanskrit of common people according to Thinkers50. A minor issue for us. What is more worrying is the article itself: it starts out well by talking about Prahalad, his career to date, his wealth and his sacrifices but then it drifts into journalistic nonsense and I lost interest. This is a pity because Praja seems to be a lot better than that.

Go to www.praja.org where you will find a great deal of information about the organisation and the work it is carrying out at grass roots level in India. Praja has prepared a Citizen's Charter that reads as follows:

• Standards: The citizens are aware of the quality of services that can be expected of the MCGM and then take prescribed action if the services do not conform to these standards.
• Accountability: Through the Citizens' Charter a clear line of responsibility for the various services is established.
• Transparency: Information that is relevant to the people's needs is offered so as to enhance their participation in civic life.
• Feedback: The MCGM looks forward to the citizens using this document as we will then get an accurate response as to how effectively the public services met their needs.

There is a great deal of information on the citizen's charter here too. Click through some of these links, or all of them if you have the time, to see what Prahalad and Praja has started.

Question 6 a) How would you describe the nature and purpose of Praja (use any additional resources you can find as you wish). Take any example from the Citizen's Charter page, from the previous link; and summarise what Praja is doing in that area.
b) What feature unites Praja's approach to Waste Disposal, Public Health, Education and so on, as per the links on the Citizen's Charter page? Hint: scroll to the bottom of any of the pages in the list on the Charter page! How effective do you think this aspect of Praja's work is or is likely to be.
c) Prime Minister John Major generated a Citizen's Charter for the UK: assess the similarities between the two charters and discuss their relative successes and failures as far as you can.
d)Prahalad is in the same league as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in his desire to use his fame and wealth to help to give people at the BOP. Don't you think that such gifts are really just a way of someone rich easing their own consciences?

Where does Prahalad's reputation come from? What is it that got him into the Thinkers50 list? Perhaps his record of publications in the Harvard Business Review can explain for us, there have been 11 articles under the Prahalad banner:

Strategic Intent
Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad
July, 2005
Most leading global companies started with ambitions that were far bigger than their resources and capabilities. But they created an obsession with winning at all levels of the organization and sustained that obsession for decades.
The End of Corporate Imperialism
C.K. Prahalad, Kenneth Lieberthal
August, 2003
As they search for growth, multinational corporations will have no choice but to compete in the big emerging markets of China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil. Although it is still common to question...
Serving the World’s Poor, Profitably
C.K. Prahalad, Allen Hammond
September, 2002
Improving the lives of the billions of people at the bottom of the economic pyramid is a noble endeavor. It can also be a lucrative one.
Co-opting Customer Competence
C.K. Prahalad, Venkatram Ramaswamy
January, 2000
In the new economy, companies must incorporate customer experience into their business models—in ways hitherto untapped. Here are the challenges in doing that.
The New Meaning of Quality in the Information Age
C.K. Prahalad, M.S. Krishnan
September, 1999
A company’s software is becoming a critical source of competitive advantage and competitive risk. Yet few managers can agree on the key variables for judging its quality. Here’s a new framework for doing just that.
Competing for the Future
Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad
July, 1994
What drives your company’s agenda: your competitors’ view of the future or your own?
Strategy as Stretch and Leverage
Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad
March, 1993
Competitiveness is born in the gap between a company’s resources and its managers’ goals.
Corporate Imagination and Expeditionary Marketing
Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad
July, 1991
In the 1990s, competitive success will come from building and dominating fundamentally new markets. Core competencies are one prerequisite for creating these new markets. Corporate imagination and...
Collaborate with Your Competitors - and Win
Gary Hamel, Yves L. Doz, C.K. Prahalad
January, 1989
Collaboration between competitors is in fashion. But the rise of competitive collaboration has triggered unease about its long-term effects. Companies that benefit most from competitive...
Do You Really Have a Global Strategy?
Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad
July, 1985
Corporate response to the threat of foreign competition is often misdirected and ill timed--in part because many executives don't fully understand what global competition is. Executives must...
How MNCs Cope with Host Government Intervention
Yves L. Doz, C.K. Prahalad
March, 1980
The efforts of host governments to maintain control over their own national economies have restricted the freedom of multinational company (MNC) managers in deploying economic resources. Regulation...

Sidebar: Gary Hamel and Fast Forward 400

Did you spot that Gary Hamel also featured large in the list of authors of those articles? There you are, another Thinkers50 laureate: number 14. Like Jay Lorsch, Hamel is famous and worthy in his own right but since Hamel is on the current list, let me give you his web address so that you can go and see what makes him such a valuable thinker. You may come across this, said about Hamel, Professor Gary Hamel, the world's most profound business thinker. Now, where does it say that, I wonder? Could it be on Hamel's own web site? Erm, well, yes, nothing wrong with a bit of puffery is there? Good on ya, Gazza!

Whilst looking at other ideas in this tangential discussion on Hamel, I came across the Fast Forward 400 research project that you can read about here. It's worth another tangent. Do follow some of the links to get more of an idea of what they are trying to do. I found the page on 20 times faster rather old hat and intuitive; but I might be a little unkind in saying that. Worth a look I'd say.

Back to Prahalad now, for a while.

You must visit the site with the sub title All articles related to management guru CK Prahalad.

Core competence is part of our business vocabulary; but it comes from the work of Prahalad and Hamel. There's a specific link in the menu on the left of ckprahalad.com entitle core competency ... just click it! Clicking takes you to a page with two articles on that topic:

• Inside out strategy. Explanation of Core Competence of Hamel and Prahalad.
• Business Innovation: Core Competency and Competitive

Click on (more...) to take a look at the first one, just to see what we get: a good, short, simple page on the topic that can easily be summarised by looking at its headings:

• Inside out Corporate Strategy
• Business units
• Three tests for identifying a Core Competence
• Building a Core Competence
• Core rigidities?

Not wishing to be negative at all; but let me leave that page with their warning, under the heading of core rigidities: Care must be taken not to let core competencies develop into core rigidities. A Corporate Competence is difficult to learn, but is difficult to unlearn as well. Companies that have spared no effort to achieve a competence, sometimes neglect new market circumstances or demands. They risk to be locked in by choices that were made in the past.

Click on the second of the two links to read an equally simple and reader friendly expose on core competency.

At the bottom of the home page of the ckprahalad.com site there is a list of recent articles about or by the man. That list is likely to change over time and their contents are diverse, so let me home in on the one I chose at random: How strategy guru CKP is changing the way CEOs think. It's a long article but it provides a few more insights into Prahalad's work in India as well as the impact he has had on corporate America and the rest of the world.

That's it! Rather a lengthy book review cum resource guide to a book that by itself is not worth the money but, when viewed with the eyes of a CK Prahalad, it becomes a very useful resource worth working with.

Finally, who are the other 46 thinkers, then? Here's the list from the book for 2005 and if you want to know who was in the list in 2003 and 2001, just go to the Thinkers50 web site.

The Thinkers50 List

Ranking & Name

1 Michael PORTER (2)

2 Bill GATES (20)

3 CK PRAHALAD (12)

4 Tom PETERS (3)

5 Jack WELCH (8)

6 Jim COLLINS (10)

7 Philip KOTLER (6)

8 Henry MINTZBERG (7)

9 Kjell NORDSTRÖM & Jonas RIDDERSTRÅLE (21)

10 Charles HANDY (5)

11 Richard BRANSON (34)

12 Scott ADAMS (27)

13 Thomas A. STEWART (37)

14 Gary HAMEL (4)

15 Chan KIM & Renée MAUBORGNE (31)

16 Kenichi OHMAE (19)

17 Patrick DIXON (46)

18 Stephen COVEY (16)

19 Rosabeth MOSS KANTER (9)

20 Edward DE BONO (35)

21 Clayton CHRISTENSEN (22)

22 Robert KAPLAN & David NORTON (15)

23 Peter SENGE (14)

24 Ram CHARAN (-)

25 Fons TROMPENAARS (50)

26 Russ ACKOFF (-)

27 Warren BENNIS (13)

28 Chris ARGYRIS (18)

29 Michael DELL (33)

30 Vijay GOVINDARAJAN (-)

31 Malcolm GLADWELL (-)

32 Manfred KETS DE VRIES (43)

33 Rakesh KHURANA (-)

34 Lynda GRATTON (41)

35 Alan GREENSPAN (42)

36 Edgar H SCHEIN (17)

37 Ricardo SEMLER (36)

38 DON PEPPERS (48)

39 Paul KRUGMAN (40)

40 Jeff BEZOS (39)

41 Andy GROVE (26)

42 Daniel GOLEMAN (29)

43 Leif EDVINSSON (-)

44 Jim CHAMPY (25)

45 Rob GOFFEE and Gareth JONES (-)

46 Naomi KLEIN (30)

47 Geert HOFSTEDE (47)

48 Larry BOSSIDY (-)

49 Costas MARKIDES (-)

50 Geoffrey MOORE (38)

 

© Duncan Williamson
8th July 2006

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