Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article titled “New Breed of Business Gurus Rises.” The article discusses a “ranking of influential business thinkers” that “was compiled by Thomas H. Davenport” and “H. James Wilson.” The two researchers use a technique that merges Google search results, Lexis Nexis citations, and academic citations. The top five, from a pre-selected list of 110 people, are Gary Hamel, Thomas L. Friedman, Bill Gates, Malcolm Gladwell, and Howard Gardner.
I would like to know more about the methodology behind the ranking, but I’m skeptical about its quality. For example, Thomas Friedman writes a popular newspaper column that touches on many topics outside of management. I don’t see how a count of his Google hits has much bearing on his management ideas. The article says that the book “What’s the Big Idea?”, written by Davenport and Wilson, contains more information on the methodology, so perhaps the authors account for such issues.
Not to pick the article apart, but it uses this quote to emphasize how managers are tapping into new sources of ideas: “Susan Flygare, a sales-strategy executive at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota who has attended speeches by a Harvard-educated stand-up comic, as well as by Messrs. Gladwell and Hamel.” Unless Mrs. Flygare is hinting she saw Conan O’Brien, the h-bomb seems irrelevant.
I am interested in the general topic of mining citations and internet references for influential people within a specific domain of expertise. It would be fun to create a website that returned an ordered list of gurus for any given domain or topic. Perhaps a site like that exists. If so, please point me to it.
