Monday, May 05, 2008

No female business gurus? Try this list

There was a fun article today in the Wall Street Journal that ranked the top business gurus by citation, Google hits and media mentions. Familiar names, like Gary Hamel, Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman are in the top 5.

This paragraph, though, struck me:

One notable absence from the top 20: women. The 2003 list included one woman, Harvard's Rosabeth Moss Kanter, among its top 20, but she fell in the new ranking. "I would love to hear more female speakers," says Kristi Wetherington, CEO of Capital Institutional Services Inc., a Dallas independent institutional brokerage firm.


So who would be on my list of top female gurus? How about these:

1. Herminia Ibarra, INSEAD. Powerful thinking on career management and networking.

2. Deborah Ancona, MIT. Authority on teamwork (her book "X-Teams" was one of my favorite books of 2007).

3. Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School. Organizational behavior, including the value of candor and dissent in the workplace.

4. Rita Gunther McGrath, Columbia University. Practical yet profound ideas on leadership and innovation.

5. Traci Fenton, WorldBlu. A tireless advocate and thinker on workplace democracy.

And of course Ms. Kanter.

Related posts:

"Personal Networks: useful anywhere" (Ibarra)

"Blame it on the I-Team" (Ancona)

"Great innovation requires great teams..." (Edmondson)

"A more realistic way to profit from innovation" (McGrath)

"WorldBlu 2008 List of Democratic Workplaces released" (Fenton)

Kanter's Innovation Pyramid"

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3 comments:

Unknown said...

Wow John, thanks so much for the "guru" status and putting me in the company of such fantastic women! I am truly honored. I also look forward to the day when women, particularly women in business, can be more widely acknowledged for their contribution to advancing thought.

Warmly,
Traci

Anonymous said...

Thanks, John, for taking the time to balance out the Wall Street Journal's take on who the business gurus are. It's great to be included, and as a full-time academic, I'm honored to be blessed with the term "practical!"

Anonymous said...

I completely agree with your additions to your list. The original neglected quite a few of women business that I would have liked to see added to the list.