Harvard Business Publishing

Since the Wall Street Journal published our list of management gurus (I prefer "business intellectuals," but some probably think that's an oxymoron) last week, the issue that's gotten the most attention is why there were no women in the top twenty. There have been a couple of blogs (including one on the Huffington Post , and one at my employer, Babson College) that have taken up the issue.

If it were up to me, the list of management gurus--and every other list--would be evenly balanced by gender, ethnicity, age, and so forth. We just went by the numbers, and the only possible bias might come from who we ran through the methodology in the first place. We ran everyone who was in the 2003 Top 100 list, and anybody else we could think of who might have a chance. That included Rosabeth Kanter, who was in the 2003 Top 20, Renee Mauborgne (co-author of Blue Ocean Strategy), Tammy Erickson (author of a number of recent articles and books on generational issues, and author of a HarvardBusiness.org blog), and organizational behavior professor Herminia Ibarra. Kanter is a bona fide management guru, but she's been less active of late in publishing and speaking. Mauborgne is a rising star, but has also been less prolific recently. Erickson has been extremely productive in the last few years, but perhaps not for long enough to hit the big time list. Ibarra left Harvard to teach at INSEAD in Europe, which doesn't help your ranking--see below.

Some blog commenters suggested less mainstream female candidates--Oprah Winfrey, for example--but unless I'm mistaken, she doesn't write on management topics, and that's one of the criteria for listing. The distinguished organizational expert Edith Penrose was suggested, but she's no longer among the living--another criterion. Someone suggested Charlene Li, co-author of a recent book on social media and of another Harvard Business Online blog Fine, but she's just getting started, and I would guess she needs to keep producing this sort of thing for another decade or so before making the list. Some have just criticized the ranking criteria (including a couple of men who didn't make the top twenty); to that I say two things. One, I didn't create them; Judge Richard Posner did for a list of political or "public" intellectuals . Two, it's true that any set of criteria is somewhat arbitrary--so you are welcome to propose others--but this is the most rigorous and reasonable set I've seen.

The reasons why particular women may not have made the list begin to suggest a set of rules for making it. Women--or any other interest group you may prefer--need only follow them assiduously to become a Top 20 Guru. Here's the list:

Keep at it for a long time. Most of those gurus at or near the top of the list have been writing about management issues for a couple of decades or so. Howard Gardner, who is #5 in the new list, is a relative newbie to management, but he's been writing and speaking about multiple intelligences for many moons.

Write a huge best-seller. The newcomers to the list, Malcolm Gladwell and Tom Friedman, have written enormous best-sellers. If I knew how to do that I would have already done so, but perhaps you can figure it out.

Find a regular outlet for your writing. Again, Friedman has his New York Times column, and Gladwell has his New Yorker pieces. Jeff Pfeffer wrote for Business 2.0. Phil Kotler writes marketing textbooks. Economist Hal Varian was #10 in 2003; he stopped writing his NYT column, and now he's out of the top twenty.

Don't be a second author. If you co-author, make sure your name is first. Second authors get screwed in both media mentions and citations. This may have been a problem for Renee Mauborgne--she was the second author to jump into the blue ocean.

Move to the United States. Geert Hofstede--whose presence on the list surprised me despite his great work on organizational cultures--is the only European on the Top 20 list, and there are no Asians.

Write about broad, sweeping topics. The top-ranked gurus tend to write about business and management in a very broad--almost intergalactic--fashion. If you restrict yourself to topics like the workforce (as does Tammy Erickson) or information and technology (as do I), you are likely to find yourself down the list a bit.

Can women pull this off? I don't see why not. It's not rocket science--and for that matter there are plenty of female rocket scientists. Maybe in 2012 or so we'll do another list, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you.