Biggest Business Thinkers?

The Wall Street Journal's recently published rankings of the most influential business thinkers proves
much better than the rankings they published five years ago, in that they have identified a substantially more significant cohort of people.   Davenport and Cronin's (DC) methodology is based on Google hits, media mentions, and academic citations, whereas our result come from an analysis of Wikipedia.

Of the top 15 from their (DC) 2013 ratings, fully 11 rank among the 20,000 most significant historical figures, and even the weakest of the bunch (Harvard Business School's Michael Porter) still ranks a respectable 32,734.   By contrast, only six of the people from the 2008 list hit the top 20K, and four of them rank substantially below Porter.  Notably Gary Hamel was their top guru of 2008, but ranks a paltry 82,551 in our assessment.

Our rankings of their most influential business thinkers of 2013 are given in brackets, while their ranking is given in ():

• [904] Bill Gates (3)
• [3198] Jimmy Wales (15)
• [3452] Paul Krugman  (1)
• [3865] Richard Branson (7) 
• [6419] Joseph Stiglitz  (2)
• [6531] Niall Ferguson  (12)
• [9828] Muhammad Yunus (11)
• [10940] Thomas Friedman  (5)
• [15741] Michael Dell (13)
• [16196] Robert Reich  (9)
• [16725] Malcolm Gladwell  (8)
• [22424] Jack Welch  (10)
• [24526] Eric Schmidt  (6)
• [25654] Howard Gardner (14)
• [32734] Michael Porter  (4)

By contrast, our rankings of his 2008 list are:

• [904] Bill Gates (3)
• [3865] Richard Branson (13)
• [10940] Thomas Friedman (2)
• [15741] Michael Dell (15)
• [16196] Robert Reich (7)
• [16725] Malcolm Gladwell (4)
• [25654] Howard Gardner (5)
• [28999] Henry Mintzberg (9)
• [31050] Philip Kotler (6)
• [31899] Stephen Covey (10)
• [32734] Michael Porter (14)
• [45517] Peter Senge (12)
• [61705] Daniel Goleman (8)
• [82551] Gary Hamel (1)
• [147612] Jeffrey Pfeffer (11)