His most recent focus is on how 3D printing will change strategies, firms, markets, and even geopolitics. His book, The Pan-Industrial Revolution: How New Manufacturing Titans Will Transform the World (2018), explains the strategic implications of recent advances in additive manufacturing.

Richard A. D’Aveni is the Bakala Professor of Strategy at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, as well as a law degree and MBA.

He is a previous winner of the Thinkers50 Strategy Award and has been a fixture on the Thinkers50 ranking of the world’s leading management thinkers since its inception in 2001.  D’Aveni’s research looks for the winning competitive strategies used by corporations, governments, militaries, and sports teams in conflict. He seeks the fundamental principles of the application of power that transcends time, space, type of rival, and arena of competition.

His first book, Hypercompetition (1994), predicted the evaporation of long term competitive advantages based on barriers to entry and power over buyers, suppliers, and substitutes. It foresaw the demise of national oligopolies, broken up by challengers with temporary advantages in the dynamic economy of the late 1990s and beyond. Next, Strategic Supremacy (2001) predicted that global companies would aim to replace national oligopolies with new global spheres of influence. These spheres of influence would create new forms of barriers to entry. Beating the Commodity Trap (2010) described how spheres of influence in turn would be undermined by commoditization in local markets, and offered a variety of tactical responses.

Strategic Capitalism (2012) looked at the many types of capitalism emerging around the world, especially in China, and foresaw conflicts between some incompatible models. It predicted an economic cold war, including over trade, between the U.S. and China.

“Traditional approaches to strategy are largely static, assuming industry structure is fixed and companies’ strategies are set in stone,” says Don Sull, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and Eisenhardt’s co-author. “Kathy has produced a steady stream of fresh insights showing how start-ups and large companies can pursue dynamic strategies to adapt to uncertain markets. Her research is grounded in rigorous research but also deeply practical for both entrepreneurs and corporate leaders.” 

Eisenhardt’s research, teaching, and consulting focus is strategy and organization, especially in technology-based companies and high-velocity industries. She is currently studying the use of “simple rules” heuristics, strategic interaction in new markets and ecosystems, strategy making in marketplaces, and designing business models that scale. She actively advises both PhD students and corporate executives.

On the origins of her work on simple rules, Eisenhardt and co-author Don Sull explained: “To shape their high-level strategies, companies like Intel and Cisco relied not on complicated frameworks but on simple rules of thumb. This was true even though they were in extraordinarily complex, challenging, and fast-moving industries. The rules were not only simple, we found, but quite specific. Typically, managers had identified one critical process—making acquisitions, for example, or allocating capital—where a bottleneck impeded growth, and then crafted a handful of guidelines to manage that process.”  She often uses multi-case theory building methods to probe deeply inside firms, and more recently machine learning for theory building to capture large-scale pattern recognition.

Eisenhardt holds multiple honorary degrees and awards for scholarly contributions. She received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Brown University, holds an M.S. in computer science and her Ph.D. is from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Follett’s career was largely spent in social work though her books appeared regularly — The New State (1918), an influential description of Follett’s brand of dynamic democracy, and Creative Experience (1924), Follett’s first business-oriented book.  In her later years she was in great demand as a lecturer.  After the death of a long-time partner, Isobel Briggs in 1926, she moved to London.

Generally ignored, Follett was decades ahead of her time.  She was discussing issues such as teamworking and responsibility in the first decades of the twentieth century.  The breadth and humanity of her work was a refreshing counter to the dehumanized visions of Taylor and others.  The simple thrust of Follett’s thinking was that people were central to any business activity — or, indeed, to any other activity.  In particular, she explored conflict.  She argued that as conflict is a fact of life “we should, I think, use it to work for us”.  Follett pointed out three ways of dealing with confrontation: domination, compromise or integration.  The latter, she concluded, is the only positive way forward. 

Follett’s views were a large step beyond those of Elton Mayo and the Hawthorne investigators.  While Mayo offered a humanistic view of the workplace, it was still one which assumed that the behavior of workers was dictated by the “logic of sentiment” while that of the bosses was by the “logic of cost and efficiency”. 

There was also a modern ring to Follett’s advice on leadership though she was concerned that the actual term leadership was unhelpful – it smacked of dictatorship, being told what to do.  Her vision of leadership was of “reciprocal leadership”, “a partnership in following, of following the invisible leader–the common purpose”.  In addition, Follett was an early advocate of management training and that leadership could be taught. 

Follett’s work was largely neglected in the West.  Peter Drucker recalled that when he was seeking out management literature in the 1940s no-one even mentioned her name.  Once again, however, a Western thinker was honored in Japan which even boasts a Follett Society.

In practice Spaulding managed the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company for over fifty years (1900-1952).  It became America’s largest Black-owned business, with assets of over $40 million when he died.

“C. C. Spaulding was an exceptional business pioneer and transformative management guru whose insightful thought leadership and practical expertise, along with his people-oriented values, render him worthy of the title Father of African American Management and membership of the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame. He was a business pioneer who overcame the odds to become one of the most successful Black business executives in the early twentieth century,” say Leon Prieto and Simone Phipps, authors of African American Management History: Insights on Gaining a Cooperative Advantage.  “Spaulding’s contributions were significant, from his insight regarding the fundamental necessities for the effective management of a business and the cardinal points of entrepreneurship, to his management style and implementation of practices which reflected his recognition of the importance of transformational leadership, employee development, diversity, corporate social responsibility and a strong positive culture for the successful management of an enterprise.”

Spaulding’s 1927 article “The administration of big business” provides his considered and comprehensive take on the nature of management.  He sets down professional standards for managers which foreshadow the later professionalization of management through Alfred P. Sloan and others. Spaulding champions the role of co-operation—“thorough-going co-operation is essential on the part of the executives in the development of big business. What I mean by co-operation is: a complete unity in matters of policy and a thorough knowledge of all of the details of management in the various departments.”  There should, he contends be a familial spirit among managers—“the executives of an organization are a family and that family should be as well organized and as well protected as any natural family in the community.”

Spaulding concludes: “The chief problem of big business is the problem of contact. The problem of contact is the chief problem of human intercourse. Personal contact, business contact, if not properly directed and if not based on mutual goodwill and intelligence derived from a common sense education, will develop personal conflict and business conflict instead of personal co-operation and business co-operation.”

Teece has over thirty years of experience as a consultant to businesses and governments around the world.  In 2010 he co-founded the Berkeley Research Group, an expert services and consulting firm of leading professionals with expertise in domains ranging from economics to healthcare to corporate finance. BRG has 40 offices and more than 1,300 employees. Teece also co-founded and took public two other professional services firms. He is an advisor to CEOs, and an investor in startups, and a coach and lecturer through the Legacy Academy and the Berkeley Executive Institute.

He has authored over 30 books and 200 scholarly papers. He is co-editor of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management and of Industrial and Corporate Change. 

Teece pioneered the dynamic capabilities  perspective, defined as “the ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competencies to address rapidly changing environments.” Dynamic capabilities can be distinguished from operational capabilities, which pertain to the current operations of an organization. The assumption of the dynamic capabilities framework is that core competencies should be used to modify short-term competitive positions that can be used to build longer-term competitive advantage. According to Science Watch, Teece’s paper (with Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen) “Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management” was the most cited paper in economics and business globally for the period from 1995 to 2005.

He has also created what has come to be known as the “profiting from innovation” framework, sometimes knows as the “Teece model” that predicts whether the pioneer will likely win in the innovative game or whether followers with relevant complementary assets are likely to eclipse the innovator.  He is also known for his work on business models, business strategy, and technical innovation.

Teece describes himself as a scholar-entrepreneur, explaining: “Being both reflective and a doer might seem like an oxymoron, but it is not. Doing, and doing the right thing, are different activities and require different skills.  The competent scholar-entrepreneur has a chance to be reflective while doing the right things, the things that produce positive results in the market-place and yield social value. This quest to be both reflective and entrepreneurial, hopefully employing practical wisdom, has animated my activities.”

His key research concerns are how, in the era of globalization, companies can no longer develop strategies on a country-by-country basis but need to develop globally integrated strategies that leverage industry globalization drivers. He has extended this approach to the challenging issue of how multinational companies can run global account management programs. He now focuses on how China is moving from imitation to innovation and what Western companies can learn from this new phenomenon.

Yip grew up in Hong Kong, Burma and England and has forged a uniquely global career combined with a prolific output of articles and books.  He was Professor of Strategy and Co-Director of the Centre on China Innovation at China Europe International Business School; Dean of Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University; Beckwith Professor of Marketing and Strategy at Cambridge Judge; Professor and Associate Dean at London Business School; and Lead Senior Fellow of the UK’s Advanced Institute of Management Research, as well as positions at Harvard Business School, Georgetown and UCLA.

He has also been a vice president and Director of Research & Innovation at Capgemini Consulting, a senior manager at Price Waterhouse and a manager at Unilever. “I started working at Unilever and then did my MBA. During my very first class in the MBA, I felt a desire to be on the other side,” says Yip. “I feel that my experience in both the academic and private business sector has been a major advantage; as Dean, I got to apply strategic concepts which is my main area of research anyway, while doing the job. That is how I helped get RSM as a school to the number six rank in Europe and London Business School's MBA  to number one in the world.”

His latest work champions the concept of “organizational intelligence” -- “OQ, as we’ll call it, consists of five competencies: sending

messages that reinforce strategy, fostering an ethos, using ‘action strategy’, rebelling from the top, and staging moments of theater.”

Yip is the author or co-author of Pioneers, Hidden Champions, Change Makers and Underdogs: Lessons From China’s Innovators (2019), China’s Next Strategic Advantage: From Imitation to Innovation (2016), Strategic Transformation (2013), Managing Global Customers (2007), Asian Advantage: Key Strategies for Winning in the Asia-Pacific Region (1998), Total Global Strategy (1992 and 2012) and Barriers to Entry (1982).

He is also an education and arts benefactor, having endowed two visiting fellowships at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was an undergraduate, then a Fellow; made donations in the memories of a former headmaster and housemaster at Dover College; and now serves on boards of opera and theater companies in Boston.

The dynamics of groups and Schein’s experience of the effects of brainwashing in the Korean War led to a developing interest in corporate culture, a term which Schein is widely credited with inventing. His work on corporate culture culminated in the 1985 book Organizational Culture and Leadership.

His more recent books include: Organizational Culture and Leadership, 4th ed (2010); Humble Inquiry: the gentle art of asking instead of telling” (2013); and Career Anchors, 4th ed, with J. VanMaanen (2013).

Schein’s model of organizational culture originated in the 1980s. In 2004, he identified three distinct levels in organizational cultures: artifacts and behaviours; espoused values; and assumptions.

Schein’s subsequent work on culture identified three cultures of management, which he labels “the key to organizational learning in the 21st century”.   The three cultures are the operator culture (‘an internal culture based on operational success’); the engineering culture (created by ‘the designers and technocrats who drive the core technologies of the organization’) and the executive culture formed by executive management, the CEO and immediate subordinates.

Schein has also been a long time commentator on the now fashionable subject of careers. He originated key phrases such as the psychological contract – the unspoken bond between employee and employer – and careers anchors. Schein proposed that once mature we have a single ‘career anchor’, which is the underlying career value that we could not surrender. ‘Over the last 25 years, because of dual careers and social changes the emphasis of careers has shifted’, he says. ‘The career is no longer over arching. It is probably healthy because it makes people more independent. Lifestyle has become the increasingly important career anchor.’

His many awards and honours include: Lifetime Achievement Award in Workplace Learning and Performance from the American Society of Training and Development (2000). Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award of the Academy of Management, 2009; and Life Time Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association, 2012.

He is the Distinguished Professor of Business at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California and the founder and director of USC’s Center for Effective Organizations.

Lawler is the author of 45 books and more than 350 articles which range from studies on compensation to employee participation to the right organizational structure for the 21st Century. His bestsellers include High Involvement Management (1986) and Corporate Boards (2001), co-authored with Jay Conger and David Finegold.

His recent books include Rewarding Excellence (2000), Corporate Boards: New Strategies for Adding Value at the Top (2001), Organizing for High Performance (2001), Treat People Right (2003), Human Resources Business Process Outsourcing (2004), Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness (2006), America at Work (2006), The New American Workplace (2006), Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage (2008), Management Reset: Organizing for Sustainable Effectiveness (2011), Effective Human Resource Management: A Global Analysis (2012), The Agility Factor (2014), Corporate Stewardship (2015), and Global Trends in Human Resource Management (2015).

BusinessWeek named Lawler as one of the top six gurus in the field of management, and Human Resource Executive called him one of HR’s most influential people. Workforce magazine identified him as one of the twenty-five visionaries who have shaped today’s workplace over the past century.

His other books include The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership-Powered Company (with Stephen Drotter and James Noel) which was updated in 2011; Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty; What The CEO Wants You To Know; and Every Business Is A Growth Business (with Noel Tichy); The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers, (co-authored with Bill Conaty); and The Attacker’s Advantage: Turning Uncertainty into Breakthrough Opportunities.
(2015).

Growing up in northern India, Charan worked in his family’s shoe shop. He later studied and taught at Harvard Business School, where he was awarded an MBA (1965) and a doctorate (1967).

Now in his seventies, Charan remains famously peripatetic. He only purchased his first apartment – in Dallas, Texas – aged 67 (although he is believed to spend very little time there). He was named Global Indian of the Year for 2010 by the Economic Times of India. The American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) presented him with its Champion of Workplace Learning and Performance Award in the same year.

He went to the University of California, at Berkeley, and worked, in particularly, with David Teece.  His best known work is in the area of knowledge management. He is co-author (with Hirotaka Takeuchi) of The Knowledge-Creating Company.

“I see management as a way of life,” says Nonaka. “Instead of simply chasing numbers, wise leaders focus on shaping the future together with others considering shared contexts and the common good. Such leaders can judge goodness and set good goals; they can grasp the essence and perceive reality as it is; they create shared contexts or dynamic ba; articulate and communicate the essence as a story; exercise political power to realize such a story; and foster practical wisdom (phronesis) in others to continue their transformation journey.”

After the war Bennis was an undergraduate at Antioch College studying under Douglas McGregor, creator of the motivational Theories X and Y.  Later, Bennis followed McGregor to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he received his PhD in economics and social science. He went on to join the school’s faculty and was chairman of the Organization Studies Department.

From being an early student of group dynamics in the 1950s; Bennis became a futurologist in the 1960s.   His work – particularly The Temporary Society (1968) – explored new organizational forms. Since the 1980s he has become best known for his work on leadership – at best in Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge (1985) based on research examining the lives of 90 of America’s best known leaders from McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc to Neil Armstrong.

The author of over 25 books and numerous papers, Gardner is probably best known in the business world for his book Five Minds for the Future (2007) – the five minds are disciplined, synthesizing, creative, respectful, and ethical. He sees the radically changed technological and information environment as demanding new cognitive abilities “… that will command a premium in the years ahead.”

It was in 1989, with the publication of The Age of Unreason that his thinking made a great leap forwards.  Handy foresaw a future of “discontinuous change”.  Like many of Handy’s phrases, this has now entered the management mainstream. His other bestselling books include The Empty Raincoat, Beyond Certainty and The Elephant and the Flea.  He has also written books with his wife, the photographer Elizabeth Handy, and appeared regularly on BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day.

Kaplan and Norton first brought the balanced scorecard to the attention of the managerial masses in their Harvard Business Review article, “The Balanced Scorecard—Measures that Drive Performance” (1992). Since then, they have written numerous books together focusing on aspects of the concept.

Kaplan is Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School. Norton is the founder and director of The Palladium Group, the US based organizational strategy consultants. As well as the Balanced Scorecard, Kaplan co-developed the concept of activity based costing, and has applied this approach to health care with his Harvard colleague, Michael Porter.

The push to look at marketing came from being taught by Milton Friedman and Paul Samulelson at Chicago.  “I concluded that if those two great minds couldn’t agree on economic issues, I probably wasn’t going to make a difference in that field,” he observed. “At the same time, I was attracted to very tangible problems that economists don’t deal with, such as: how much do you spend on advertising? What’s a sensibly-sized salesforce? How do you really set prices intelligently? I got into the mindset of a market.”

Kotler has dominated marketing over the last four decades and remains an energized force on marketing’s behalf, traveling the world continually. Along the way he has pushed the frontiers of where marketing can make a difference.

In between these important books, Mintzberg staked out his unique take on strategy in landmark articles on “crafting strategy” and the book The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994).  Serious stuff, leavened with humanity. Along the way, Mintzberg has been a persistent though constructive critic of business school education, most notably in Managers not MBAs (2004).

Peters went on to write, Liberation Management (1992), which set the managerial agenda for the 1990s. Peters’ most recent book is The Little BIG Things: 163 Ways to Pursue EXCELLENCE (2010). Even now, Peters’ speeches are a restless tour de force.  His views have moved with reality. He is a keen tweeter, voracious reader, and endlessly enthusiastic. And, smart.

Ohmae is a concert-level flautist, a former McKinsey consultant, politician, entrepreneur and hyperactive intellect.  He is also a MIT-trained nuclear physicist and, in 2011, coordinated a report into the Fukushima nuclear accident and has gone onto become a member of The “Nuclear Reform Monitoring Committee” of Tokyo Electric Power Company.