Ratan Tata among top 50 global thinkers of 2009

Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata has been ranked among the world's most influential business thinkers and named in the Thinkers 50.

Thinkers 50 is a biennial ranking of the top 50 business and management thought leaders in the world, brought out by the UK-based Suntop Media.

The list, which is headed by management thinker and author C K (Coimbatore Krishnarao) Prahalad, names six Indians.

Apart from Prahalad and Tata, who made his debut at No 12, is Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, at No 15, business consultant Ram Charan No 13 and Vijay Govindarajan, founding director of Tuck's Center for Global Leadership, at No. 24.

Charan and Govindrajan have been on th list earlier at No 22 and 23 respectively.

Prahalad, who has featured in the list every year, tops the 50 this year, as he did in 2007, for his remarkable ability to be ahead of the times.

In 2007, Prahlad unseated the formidable strategy don Michael Porter.

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Tipping Point, Blink and the more recent Outliers, came in at No 2, while Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman came in at No 3, followed by Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Apart from the growing influence of Indian thought leaders, this year's Thinkers 50 shows some other interesting trends. This year's ranking has 14 notable new entrants like Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus at No 6, Google's Eric Schmidt, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Rotman School of Management's Roger Martin, Wired's Chris Anderson, Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, economic historian Niall Ferguson and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

The economic turbulence has had a bearing on the ranking, bringing to the forefront people such as Krugman and Stiglitz whose ideas now have even more takers.

Also, as the ranking points out, ''caring capitalists are the new heroes'', be it Prahalad's idea of the Bottom of the Pyramid, Bill Gates' concept of creative capitalism, which borrows from Prahalad's ideas to some extent, or Muhammad Yunus and the micro-credit revolution in Bangladesh which has spawned several new innovations.

Interestingly, 26 per cent of the top 50 have entered the ranking for the first time, rubbing shoulders with Tom Peters, Jim Collins, Henry Mintzberg, Warren Bennis, Charles Handy and John Kotter still figure in the ranking.

2009 Results                                                                           (www.Thinkers50.com )