Best for Talent

Research into talent has never been so important and practically useful. Thinkers50 founders Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove spend their time scanning the world of business ideas. Here is their selection of the best thinkers on talent.

Jennifer Aaker
Social psychologist, Professor of Marketing at Stanford.  Co-author (with Andy Smith) of The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Impact Social Change (Jossey-Bass, 2010). Aaker’s research focuses on the psychology of time, money and happiness.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
University College, London and Columbia academic as well as head of assessment company. Author of the book Confidence (Profile, 2013).

Robin Ely
Harvard Business School professor and expert on gender and race issues.

Tammy Erickson
McKinsey Award-winning author and adjunct professor at London Business School. Her books include Plugged In (HBR, 2008) and What’s Next gen X? (HBR, 2008).

Claudio Fernandez-Araoz
Senior adviser at Egon Zehnder. Author of It’s Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best, (HBR, 2014).

Stew Friedman
Practice professor at Wharton. Books include Total Leadership (HBR, 2008) and Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women, (Wharton Digital Press, 2013), and Leading the Life You Want (HBR, 2014).

Adam Galinsky & Maurice Schweitzer
The Columbia and Wharton professors are authors of Friend and Foe (Crown, 2015) which argues that the foundation of all human interaction lies in cooperation and competition. The key is to balance the tension between the two.

Marshall Goldsmith
Executive coach, teacher and best-selling author, Goldsmith’s latest book (co-authored with Mark Reiter) is Triggers: Creating Behaviors That Last, (Crown, 2015).

Monika Hamori
Professor at IE Business School in Madrid, co-author (with Peter Cappelli & Rocio Bonet) ‘Who’s Got Those Top Jobs?’(Harvard Business Review, March 2014).

Whitney Johnson
Founder and Managing Director of Springboard Fund, and co-founder of Rose Park Advisors along with Clayton Christensen. Author of Dare, Dream, Do (Bibliomotion, 2012); and Disrupt Yourself, (Bibliomotion, 2015).

Nilofer Merchant
Silicon Valley-based ex-exec Merchant, author of 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era (HBR, 2012).

Doug Ready
Author of Harvard Business Review articles, Senior Lecturer in Organization Effectiveness at the MIT Sloan School of Management and founder of the International Consortium for Executive Development Research.

Zeynep Ton
Adjunct associate professor in the operations management group at MIT Sloan School of Management.  Before MIT Sloan, she spent seven years on the faculty at Harvard Business School. Author of The Good Jobs Strategy (New Harvest, 2014).