Photo: Getty Images
The Wall Street Journal has published a list of the most influential business thinkers based on Google hits, media mentions, and academic citations. The roster includes psychologists, journalists, and chief executives, but there’s one thing it doesn’t have: women. There are no people of the lady persuasion in the top twenty. When the list was originally compiled in 2003, it included one woman, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, among its top twenty, but she has fallen in the new ranking. We figured Suze Orman would be a shoo-in considering the financial expert has basically been knighted by Oprah. So who are the gurus secretly controlling the economy? The top five are as follows:
1. Strategy guru Gary Hamel
2. Times columnist Thomas Friedman
3. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates
4. New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell
5. Harvard professor Howard Gardner
Journal say what? Thomas Friedman is more powerful than Bill Gates? We have highly underestimated the Mustache of Understanding. As for Gladwell, God help you if you take his advice. That hair alone is untrustworthy. —Noelle Hancock
