A business guru is a

manager Management (or managing) is the administration of organizations, whether businesses, nonprofit organizations, or a government bodies through business administration, nonprofit management, or the political science sub-field of public administra ...

that can be defined as 'a person with influential ideas or theories about business'. The earliest use of the term business guru can be tracked back to the 1960s being used in ''

Business Week ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'' (and before that ''Business Week'' and ''The Business Week''), is an American monthly business magazine published 12 times a year. The magazine debuted in New York City in Septembe ...

''. There are no existing qualifications that make someone a business guru. Anyone can become a business guru by making impact in a particular

industry Industry may refer to: Economics * Industry (economics), a generally categorized branch of economic activity * Industry (manufacturing), a specific branch of economic activity, typically in factories with machinery * The wider industrial sector ...

. It's also possible to claim to be a business guru at any time. It's not a title. The lists of people who have been accepted as business gurus have constantly changed over time. However, there are some people who have been accepted by a great majority as a business guru and also some organizations which have created their own lists of gurus. One English writer has described management gurus as "overwhelmingly a US phenomenon."

Examples and lists

There is no definitive list of business gurus, but some writers have proposed "personal" lists. These lists are mostly created by organizations such as business magazines or management writers. There have been many business guru lists created through history. A list consisting of people who are included in almost all of the lists created, collectively known as the "Famous Five", are:

Frederick Winslow Taylor Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856 – March 21, 1915) was an American mechanical engineer. He was widely known for his methods to improve industrial efficiency. He was one of the first management consulting, management consultants. In 190 ...

Michael Porter Michael Eugene Porter (born May 23, 1947) is an American businessman and professor at Harvard Business School. He was one of the founders of the consulting firm The Monitor Group (now part of Deloitte) and FSG, a social impact consultancy. ...

, Alfred Sloan,

Peter Drucker Peter Ferdinand Drucker (; ; November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) was an Austrian American management consultant, educator, and author, whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of modern management theory. H ...

, and

Douglas McGregor Douglas Murray McGregor (September 6, 1906 – October 1, 1964) was an American management professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and president of Antioch College from 1948 to 1954. He also taught at the Indian Institute of Management Ca ...

. In 2001, ''Harvard Business Review'' asked the gurus to name their favorite gurus. The people named were Peter Drucker, James March and Herbert Simon. Another list includes Peter Drucker, Michael Porter, and

Tom Peters Thomas J. Peters (born November 7, 1942), an American writer on business management , business-management practices, became best-known for his 1982 book ''In Search of Excellence'' (co-authored with Robert H. Waterman Jr.) Life and education ...

as the three leading gurus of our time. There are also many gurus who have emerged and disappeared through history.

Fordism Fordism is an industrial engineering and manufacturing system that serves as the basis of modern social and labor-economic systems that support industrialized, standardized mass production and mass consumption. The concept is named after Henry ...

- named for

Henry Ford Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was an American Technological and industrial history of the United States, industrialist and business magnate. As the founder of the Ford Motor Company, he is credited as a pioneer in making automob ...

- ranked alongside Frederick Winslow Taylor's

Taylorism Scientific management is a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflows. Its main objective is improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity. It was one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the engineer ...

in the early-20th century. A Russian tradition commemorates

Lavrentiy Beria Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria ka, ლავრენტი პავლეს ძე ბერია} ''Lavrenti Pavles dze Beria'' ( – 23 December 1953) was a Soviet politician and one of the longest-serving and most influential of Joseph ...

(executed in 1953 despite having run the massive

Gulag The Gulag was a system of Labor camp, forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word ''Gulag'' originally referred only to the division of the Chronology of Soviet secret police agencies, Soviet secret police that was in charge of runnin ...

organisation and the

Soviet atomic bomb project The Soviet atomic bomb project was authorized by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons during and after World War II. Russian physicist Georgy Flyorov suspected that the Allied powers were secretly developing a " superwea ...

) as the "best manager of the 20th century. In Germany, became the postwar management guru. The Japanese were known for making improvements to the business world and producing gurus in the 1980s, including Keniche Ohmae and Akio Morita. Then European gurus emerged, such as Yves Doz,

Geert Hofstede Gerard Hendrik (Geert) Hofstede (2 October 1928 – 12 February 2020) was a Dutch social psychologist, IBM employee, and Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, ...

, Manfred Kets De Vries and

Charles Handy Charles Brian Handy, CBE (25 July 1932 – 13 December 2024) was an Irish author and philosopher who specialised in organisational behaviour and management. Among the ideas he advanced are the " portfolio career" and the " shamrock organizatio ...

Criticisms of "guru" status

One management expert,

Gary Hamel Gary P. Hamel (born November 9, 1954) is an American management consultant. He is a founder of Strategos, an international management consulting firm based in Chicago. Education Hamel was born on November 9, 1954, in St. Joseph, Michigan. He ...

, says there have been "few genuine breakthroughs" since the work of Taylor and

Max Weber Maximilian Carl Emil Weber (; ; 21 April 186414 June 1920) was a German Sociology, sociologist, historian, jurist, and political economy, political economist who was one of the central figures in the development of sociology and the social sc ...

. In his book, Hamel says that management is "stuck in a time warp." Similarly, even one of the authors of a book about management gurus warns that

management theory Management science (or managerial science) is a wide and interdisciplinary study of solving complex problems and making strategic decisions as it pertains to institutions, corporations, governments and other types of organizational entities. It is ...

is "not served well by fads," citing

Enron Enron Corporation was an American Energy development, energy, Commodity, commodities, and services company based in Houston, Texas. It was led by Kenneth Lay and developed in 1985 via a merger between Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth, both re ...

as a "

management fad Management (or managing) is the administration of organizations, whether businesses, nonprofit organizations, or a government bodies through business administration, nonprofit management, or the political science sub-field of public administr ...

for its supposed culture of

innovation Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or service (economics), services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a n ...

References

{{Reflist Management consulting

Examples and lists

Criticisms of "guru" status

See also

References