Our new ranking of the Top 20 management gurus is out this week in a couple of Wall Street Journal articles (one on the list itself and one on what motivates the top gurus ). Erin White, the reporter, did a great job of writing about the list. Jim Wilson and Josh Herzig-Marx, my Babson colleagues, did a great job of pulling the numbers together. But some may wonder why this is important.

Management gurus can be enormously influential in all kinds of organizations. Keynes said that “practical men…are usually slaves to some defunct economist;” today’s equivalent influencer is a management thinker. It’s easy to lampoon new management ideas as faddish and facile, but they often revitalize organizations and their employees. The best management ideas—e.g., Jim Collins’ work in Good to Great—are based on solid evidence and avoid simplistic answers. They can be influential for years, as Collins’ ideas have been. Collins moved up in the list since our 2003 ranking in the book "What’s the Big Idea," but he didn’t make this year’s Top 20.

Why isn’t he higher if his ideas are so good? Unfortunately, the list is not a ranking of the quality of the ideas. A high-ranking management guru has to be a good promoter as well as a good researcher and sound thinker. Collins—like Michael Porter, who was at the top of the 2003 list but fell a bit (to #14) in the new list—doesn’t do a lot of conference speeches, doesn’t have much of a web presence, and doesn’t write much in the popular press. If you want your ideas to be really influential, you’ve got to be out hawking them all the time.

So who did well? Gary Hamel (see his HBS Online page) is at the top, and I attribute that to his nimbleness at taking up the important ideas of the day and producing significant articles and books on them. Bill Gates remains high (#3)—not necessarily because of his great management ideas, but because of Microsoft, his wealth, and his foundation. Tom Friedman (#2), Malcolm Gladwell (#4), and Howard Gardner (#5) zoomed up from nowhere to hit the top 5 this year.

Interestingly, none of these latter three people are traditional management experts. Friedman and Gladwell are primarily journalists, and Gardner is an educational psychologist. Why have these interlopers prospered to such a degree? I chalk it up to two factors: the increased desire to master people issues in business—we’ve finally realized they’re always the most difficult to address—and the ever-decreasing attention span of businesspeople. Many of them want few academic details and an entertaining story, which these journalists know how to provide. I don’t always agree with the quality of Gladwell’s evidence, but I am certainly impressed by his writing ability. Some of Friedman’s ideas seem quite obvious to me, but he knows how to put together a sentence. That didn’t matter much in the old days of management gurudom, but it seems much more important now.