Management Gurus

Here is a survey of curated management thought leaders and their books. Check it out and see if you have any others to add. This is a great starting point for understanding management practice and principles. Or maybe there are a few gaps to fill in your knowledge. I hope you find it useful!

1. Top Management Gurus Though Leaders and Books

2. Management Gurus Here is a short list of some of the most sought after business gurus and management experts and their influential books. Some of these come from a study by Accenture, the international consulting firm. Accenture defined them as business intellectuals but they are better known as management gurus. Some were picked from a recent article in the Economist about the state of the guru industry. They are thought leaders, providing the latest and best business thinking.

3. Peter Drucker Credited with inventing management studies Business philosopher and consultant for over 50 years. MbO : Manage by Objectives Measurements of performance What gets measured gets managed

4. Peter Drucker Drucker’s first major work,  The End of Economic Man , was published in 1939. After reading it, Winston Churchill described Drucker as “one of those writers to whom almost anything can be forgiven because he not only has a mind of his own, but has the gift of starting other minds along a stimulating line of thought.” A number of his other books are considered classics:  Concept of the Corporation  in 1946,  The Practice of Management  in 1954,  The Effective Executive  in 1967,  Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices  in 1973,  Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 1985,  Post-Capitalist Society  in 1993,  Management Challenges for the 21st Century  in 1999, and in 2001  The Essential Drucker .

5. Prominent ideas in Drucker's writings: Decentralization and simplification. Drucker discounted the command and control model and asserted that companies work best when they are decentralized. According to Drucker , corporations tend to produce too many products, hire employees they don't need (when a better solution would be outsourcing), and expand into economic sectors that they should avoid. The concept of what eventually came to be known as outsourcing. He used the example of "front room" and "back room" of each business: A company should be engaged in only the front room activities that are critical to supporting its core business. Back room activities should be handed over to other companies, for whom these tasks are the front room activities. “Do what you do best and outsource the rest” is a business tagline first “coined and developed in the 1990s by Drucker . The slogan was primarily used to advocate outsourcing as a viable business strategy. Drucker began explaining the concept of outsourcing as early as 1989 in his Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article entitled “Sell the Mailroom”. The need to manage business by balancing a variety of needs and goals, rather than subordinating an institution to a single value. This concept of management by objectives and self-control forms the keynote of his 1954 landmark  The Practice of Management . The concept of "knowledge worker" in his 1959 book "The Landmarks of Tomorrow". Since then, knowledge-based work has become increasingly important in businesses worldwide. A belief that taking action without thinking is the cause of every failure. A belief in the notion that great companies could stand among humankind's noblest inventions.

6. Michael Porter Harvard Business School professor and strategy expert. Author of Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors Competitive Advantage 5 Forces TED talk

7. Warren Bennis

8. Edward de Bono

9. Theodore Levitt

10. Adolph Berle

11. Harvard Business Review Harvard Business Review (HBR) is a general management magazine published 10 times a year by Harvard University. HBR' s articles cover a wide range of topics that are relevant to different industries, management functions, and geographic locations. These focus on such areas as leadership, organizational change, negotiation, strategy, operations, marketing, finance, and managing people.

12. HBR Harvard Business Review  has been the frequent publishing home for scholars and management thinkers we have discussed here such as Clayton M. Christensen, Peter F. Drucker , Michael E. Porter, and Rita Gunther McGrath , as well as Rosabeth Moss Kanter , John Hagel III, Thomas H. Davenport, Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad , Vijay Govindarajan , Robert S. Kaplan,  and others.

13. Henry Mintzberg Internationally renowned academic and author on business and management. Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Mintzberg writes prolifically on the topics of management and business strategy, with more than 150 articles and fifteen books to his name. His seminal book,  The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning , analyzed and criticizes the practices of strategic planning.

14. Books by Henry Mintzberg 1973 The Nature of Managerial Work 1979 The Structuring of Organizations: A Synthesis of the Research 1983 Power in and Around Organizations 1983 Structure in fives: Designing Effective Organizations 1989 Mintzberg on Management: Inside Our Strange World of Organizations 1994 The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: Reconceiving the Roles for Planning, Plans, Planners   2004 Managers not MBAs   2005 Strategy Bites back 2007 Tracking Strategies: Towards a General Theory of Strategy Formation 2009 Managing 2009 Management? It's not What you Think!  

15. Kenichi Ohmae The Mind of the Strategist McKinsey

16. Clayton Christensen The Innovator’s Dilemma The Innovator’s Solution Harvard Business School Disruptive Innovation: successful innovators create new markets that render established businesses irrelevant.

17. Rita McGrath Columbia B usiness School The End of Competitive Advantage

18. Richard D’Aveni Dartmouth Tuck School of Business Hyper Competition

19. Ram Charan The Attacker’s Advantage

20. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne INSEAD professors Blue Ocean Strategy Companies can succeed not by battling competitors, but rather by creating uncontested market spaces that they call blue oceans. This is like a judo move or a concept from Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Instead of focusing on battling competitors, it reframes the problem to look at creating markets where competition is irrelevant.

21. Examples of Blue Ocean strategies: Cirque du Soleil: Blending of opera and ballet with circus format while eliminating star performer and animals; Southwest Airlines: offering flexibility of bus travel at the speed of air travel using secondary airports; Curves: redefining market boundaries between health clubs and home exercise programs for women; Wii : Rather than releasing a more technologically advanced video game console with more features as in previous generations, Nintendo released a console with innovative

22. Don Tapscott The Digital Economy

23. Tom Peters & Robert Waterman Management consultant and author of In Search of Excellence.

24. Jim Collins Good to Great

25. Tom Friedman The World is Flat

26. James Champy & Michael Hammer Re-engineering the Corporation

27. C.K. Prahalad