Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in Business,

#51

Birger Wernerfelt

#10978

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Birger Wernerfelt is a Danish economist and management theorist, and JC Penney Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is best known for “A Resource-based View of the Firm” , which is one of the most cited papers in the social sciences.

#52

Rita Gunther McGrath

Rita Gunther McGrath

#13346

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Rita Gunther McGrath is an American strategic management scholar and professor of management at the Columbia Business School. She is known for her work on strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including the development of discovery-driven planning.

#53

John Quelch

#10800

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

John Anthony Quelch CBE is a British-American academic and professor. He is the former dean of the University of Miami School of Business at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida from 2017 to 2022.

#54

George S. Day

#15264

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

George S. Day is an educator and consultant in the fields of marketing, strategy and innovation management. He is the Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He founded the Mack Institute for Innovation Management at the Wharton School, where he is presently Faculty Emeritus in Residence.

#55

Arnoud De Meyer

#8478

Overall Influence

Arnoud De Meyer is a Belgian business academic at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business of Singapore Management University . He was previously President of SMU, Director of the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge, and founding Dean of INSEAD's Asia Campus in Singapore.

#56

S. P. Kothari

#8820

Overall Influence

Professor S. P. Kothari is an Indian-American academic and the Gordon Y. Billard Professor of Accounting and Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Padma Shree awardee. His field of research is strategic and policy issues, securities regulation, auditing, and corporate governance.

#57

Kazuo Hiramatsu

#15723

Overall Influence

1947 - 2020 (73 years)

Kazuo Hiramatsu was a Japanese scholar of international accounting, who served as the 17th President of Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan from 2002 to 2008. He graduated from Kwansei Gakuin University and received his Ph.D. in International Accounting. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Washington in 1977-1979, and a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow in 1991. His research interests are in financial accounting and international accounting.

#58

Henry Chesbrough

Henry Chesbrough

#12606

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Henry William Chesbrough is an American organizational theorist, adjunct professor and the faculty director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and Maire Tecnimont Chair of Open Innovation at Luiss. He is known for coining the term open innovation.

#59

James G. Ellis

#16445

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

James George Ellis is an American academician, professor, and former business executive who, for the last years, was the dean of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California.

#60

Rakesh Khurana

#11342

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Rakesh Khurana is an Indian-American educator. He is a Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Professor of Leadership Development at Harvard Business School and the Dean of Harvard College. Early life and education Khurana was born in India and was raised in Queens, New York. He received his bachelor's degree in industrial relations from Cornell, his AM in sociology from Harvard, and his PhD in organizational behavior through a joint program between the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School in 1998.

#61

Roger G. Ibbotson

#14532

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Roger G. Ibbotson is Professor Emeritus in Practice of Finance at the Yale School of Management. He is also chairman of Zebra Capital Management LLC. He has written extensively on capital market returns, cost of capital, and international investment. He is the founder, advisor, and former chairman of Ibbotson Associates, now a Morningstar Company. He has written numerous books and articles including Bonds, Bills, and Inflation with Rex Sinquefield, which serves as a standard reference for information and capital market returns.

#62

Robert Lusch

#14990

Overall Influence

1949 - 2017 (68 years)

Dr. Robert Frank Lusch was an American business professor and Professor of Marketing at the University of Arizona business school. Early life and education Lusch was born in Grosse Point, Michigan, in 1949. As an adolescent Lusch moved with his mother, father, and two sisters to Tucson, Arizona. Lusch often claimed he "grew up in Arizona"; he graduated from Tucson High School and attended the University of Arizona where he received a bachelor's degree and an MBA. In 1975 he received his Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

#63

Lester Thurow

#4716

Overall Influence

1938 - 2016 (78 years)

Lester Carl Thurow was an American political economist, former dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of books on economic topics. Education Born in Livingston, Montana, Thurow received his B.A. in political economy from Williams College in 1960, where he was in Theta Delta Chi and Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, and a Tyng Scholar. After he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, he went to Balliol College, Oxford to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, graduating in 1962 with first class honors. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1964.

#64

Edward Altman

#15065

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Edward I. Altman is a Professor of Finance, Emeritus, at New York University's Stern School of Business. He is best known for the development of the Altman Z-score for predicting bankruptcy which he published in 1968. Professor Altman is a leading academic on the High-Yield and Distressed Debt markets and is the pioneer in the building of models for credit risk management and bankruptcy prediction.

#65

Shelby D. Hunt

#16232

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Shelby D. Hunt was an American organizational theorist, the Jerry S. Rawls and P. W. Horn Professor of Marketing at the Texas Tech University, and a highly cited marketing researcher. He is noted for his contributions to competition theory and the resource-advantage view.

#66

John H. McArthur

John H. McArthur

#12706

Overall Influence

1934 - 2019 (85 years)

John Hector McArthur was a Canadian-American organizational theorist. He served as Professor of Business Administration and the 7th Dean of the Harvard Business School . Personal life McArthur was born on March 31, 1934 in Vancouver, McArthur grew up in nearby Burnaby, British Columbia. His father was a government grain inspector and his mother was a nurse. He graduated from Burnaby South High School, attended the University of British Columbia and earned a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Forestry in 1957. He earned MBA and doctorate degrees from the Harvard Business School in 1959 and 1963, ...

#67

Gareth Morgan

#7504

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Gareth Morgan is a British/Canadian organizational theorist, management consultant and Distinguished Research Professor at York University in Toronto. He is known as creator of the "organisational metaphor" concept and writer of the 1979 book Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis with Gibson Burrell and the 1986 best-seller Images of Organization.

#68

Peter Drucker

#20742

Overall Influence

1909 - 2005 (96 years)

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was an Austrian American management consultant, educator, and author, whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of modern management theory. He was also a leader in the development of management education, and invented the concepts known as management by objectives and self-control, and he has been described as "the founder of modern management".

#69

James Abegglen

#23918

Overall Influence

1926 - 2007 (81 years)

James Christian Abegglen was a Japanese business theorist and professor in management and economics at Sophia University. He was one of the founders of the Boston Consulting Group in 1963, and the first representative director of its Tokyo branch, founded in 1966.

#70

Barry Nalebuff

#7210

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Barry J. Nalebuff is an American businessman, business theorist, and writer. He is a Milton Steinbach Professor of Management at Yale School of Management and author who specializes in business strategy and game theory. His published books include Thinking Strategically and The Art of Strategy. Nalebuff's class on negotiation has over 67,000 active learners through Coursera and has the second-highest net promoter score on the platform. He has a semi-regular column in Forbes with Ian Ayres called "Why Not?"

#71

Leonard Berry

#20484

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

#72

Daniel R. Denison

#15324

Overall Influence

Daniel "Dan" R. Denison is professor of organization and management at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland, and chairman and founding partner of Denison Consulting. His area of special interest is organizational culture and leadership, and the impact they have on the performance and effectiveness of organizations. His work on organizational culture is heavily cited in the field, and he is the author of a seminal article on the distinction between organizational culture and climate . His model of organizational culture is widely known and used in academic research in organizational cul...

#73

Bernard T. Ferrari

#17172

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Bernard T. Ferrari is the second and former dean of the Carey Business School of the Johns Hopkins University. Early life and education Ferrari is a cum laude graduate of the University of Rochester from which he also received his M.D. He earned a J.D. magna cum laude from Loyola University School of Law and an M.B.A. from Tulane University Freeman School of Business.

#74

John Sterman

#15189

Overall Influence

John David Sterman is the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management, and the current director of the MIT System Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He is mostly considered as the current leader of the System Dynamics school of thought. He is the author of Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World.

#75

Douglas Diamond

#5456

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Douglas Warren Diamond is an American economist. He is currently the Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he has taught since 1979. Diamond specializes in the study of financial intermediaries, financial crises, and liquidity. He is a former president of the American Finance Association and the Western Finance Association .

#76

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld

#16478

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management at Yale School of Management, and Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies. Sonnenfeld is best known as the founder and CEO of Chief Executive Leadership Institute , affiliated with Yale University.

#77

Raj Aggarwal

#18751

Overall Influence

Raj Aggarwal is an author and contributor to the fields of finance and international business studies. Aggarwal was the dean of the University of Akron College of Business Administration from 2006 until 2009. He was elected as a fellow of the Academy of International Business. He has worked as an engineer, financial analyst, strategic planner, department chair, university budget planner and corporate board member. He has authored or co-authored over a dozen books or monographs and over a hundred scholarly articles that have cited over 5,000 times according to his profile in Google Scholar.

#78

S. Mark Young

#23187

Overall Influence

S. Mark Young is a professor and writer focused on management accounting and control, particularly in relation to the entertainment industry. He was born in Sydney, Australia and attended Homebush Primary and High Schools. After he and his family moved to the United States, he graduated from Thomas Worthington High School. He holds an A.B. degree in Economics from Oberlin College, a Master's of Accounting degree from The Ohio State University, and holds a Ph.D. in Accounting from the University of Pittsburgh.

#79

George S. Odiorne

George S. Odiorne

#19868

Overall Influence

1920 - 1992 (72 years)

George Stanley Odiorne was an American academic and management theorist. He was one of the developers of the theory, Management by Objectives . Early life George S. Odiorne was born in 1920 in Merrimac, Massachusetts. He grew up in Lowell, and he had a brother and two sisters. During World War II, he served in the United States Army in the Pacific. He graduated from Rutgers University. He then earned a master's degree and a doctorate in business administration from New York University, where he was taught by Peter Drucker.

#80

Harold Kerzner

#23180

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Harold Kerzner is an American engineer, management consultant, Emeritus Professor of Systems Management at Baldwin Wallace University, and Sr. Executive Director for Project Management at the International Institute for Learning, known for his work in the field of project management.

#81

Roger Blackwell

#14564

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Roger Blackwell is an American marketing expert and public speaker. He was described in The New York Times as one of America's top speakers on business and marketing, along with Daniel Burrus and Tom Peters. He has served on the board of directors for multiple companies, most prominently Max & Erma's Restaurant, Inc., Abercrombie & Fitch, and Worthington Foods. Blackwell was a long-time marketing professor at Ohio State University, and has also taught at Stanford University, Cape Town University in South Africa, and Guelph University in Canada. Prior to his retirement, Sales and Marketing Executives International named him Outstanding Marketing Professor in America.

#82

Byron Sharp

#27104

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Byron Sharp is a Professor of Marketing Science at the University of South Australia, known for his work on loyalty programs. Life and work Born in Auckland, New Zealand, Sharp obtained his Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing in 1988 at the University of Auckland, and his Master of Business by Research at the University of South Australia, and PhD from the University of Adelaide.

#83

Boyce Watkins

#13533

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Boyce D. Watkins is an American author, political analyst, social influencer and ex-academic. In addition to publishing scholarly articles on finance and investing, Watkins is an advocate for education, economic empowerment, and social justice, and has made regular appearances in various national media outlets, including CNN, Good Morning America, MSNBC, Fox News, BET, NPR, Essence, USA Today, Today, ESPN, The Tom Joyner Morning Show, and CBS Sports. He was also a frequent guest on The Wendy Williams Experience radio program, and remains a frequent contributor to the Grio.

#84

Tobias Preis

#5815

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Tobias Preis is Professor of Behavioral Science and Finance at Warwick Business School and a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. He is a computational social scientist focussing on measuring and predicting human behavior with online data. At Warwick Business School he directs the Data Science Lab together with his colleague Suzy Moat. Preis holds visiting positions at Boston University and University College London. In 2011, he worked as a senior research fellow with H. Eugene Stanley at Boston University and with Dirk Helbing at ETH Zurich. In 2009, he was named a member of the Gutenberg Academy.

#85

Jonah Berger

#16158

Overall Influence

Jonah Berger is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, an internationally best-selling author, and an expert on change, word of mouth, viral marketing, social influence, and how products, ideas, and behavior catch on. He has published over 50 articles in academic journals, and has written for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review. More than a million copies of his books Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior, and The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone's Mind are in print in over 35 cou...

#86

Stuart L. Hart

#20204

Overall Influence

Stuart L. Hart is an American academic, writer and theorist and the founder of Enterprise for a Sustainable World, a non-profit dedicated to helping businesses make the transition to sustainability. A Fortune 100 consultant, Hart is one of the world's leading authorities on the implications of sustainable development and environmentalism relative to business strategy. He is the S.C. Johnson Chair of Sustainable Global Enterprise and Professor of Management at Cornell University's Johnson School of Management; he is also the founder of the school's Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise and t...

#87

Philip Kotler

#27320

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Philip Kotler is an American marketing author, consultant, and professor emeritus; the S. C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University . He is known for popularizing the definition of marketing mix. He is the author of over 80 books, including Marketing Management, Principles of Marketing, Kotler on Marketing, Marketing Insights from A to Z, Marketing 4.0, Marketing Places, Marketing of Nations, Chaotics, Market Your Way to Growth, Winning Global Markets, Strategic Marketing for Health Care Organizations, S...

#88

Hunter Lovins

#8051

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

L. Hunter Lovins is an American environmentalist, author, sustainable development proponent, co-founder of Rocky Mountain Institute, and president of the nonprofit organization Natural Capitalism Solutions.

#89

J. Scott Armstrong

#18783

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

John Scott Armstrong was an author, forecasting and marketing expert, and an Emeritus Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Armstrong's research and writing in forecasting promote the ideas that in order to maximize accuracy, forecasting methods should rely on evidence-based methods.

#90

David Cooperrider

David Cooperrider

#16275

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

David Cooperrider , is the Fairmount Minerals Chair and Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, and Faculty Director at the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at Case.

#91

Russell W. Belk

#27201

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Russell W. Belk is an American business academic, currently a Distinguished Research Professor and the Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing at Schulich School of Business, York University. Professor Belk is a leading authority on consumption, consumer culture, consumer behaviour, materialism, collecting, gift-giving, sharing and the digital self. In 2017, he was elected to the Royal Order of Canada, one of the highest honours that can be bestowed on researchers in Canada.

#92

Madhav V. Rajan

#22838

Overall Influence

Madhav V. Rajan is an Indian-American professor and academic administrator. He is the dean of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. Early life Madhav V. Rajan graduated from the University of Madras in India in 1984. Rajan earned a master of science in Accounting in 1987, followed by a master of science in Industrial Administration in 1989, and a PhD in Accounting in 1990, all from Carnegie Mellon University. In 1990, his dissertation won the Alexander Henderson Award for Excellence in Economic Theory.

#93

Sheridan Titman

#21873

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Sheridan Dean Titman is a professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the McAllister Centennial Chair in Financial Services at the McCombs School of Business. He received a B.S. degree from the University of Colorado and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.

#94

Colin Mayer

#18880

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Colin Peter Mayer was the Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. He was the Peter Moores Dean of the Saïd Business School between 2006 and 2011. He is a fellow of the British Academy, a fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He is a professorial fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an honorary fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He is an ordinary member of the Competition Appeal Tribunal and was a member of the UK government Natural Capital Committee.

#95

Joseph L. Badaracco

#19632

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Joseph L. Badaracco is an American author, and the John Shad Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School. He has taught courses on business ethics, strategy and management in the School's MBA and executive programs.

#96

David Schmittlein

David Schmittlein

#21257

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

David C. Schmittlein is an American academic administrator serving as the John C Head III Dean and Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He was appointed on August 27, 2007. Prior to joining MIT, Schmittlein was the Ira A. Lipman Professor and Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

#97

Burkhard Schwenker

Burkhard Schwenker

#23636

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Burkhard Schwenker is a German business consultant. He served as CEO of Roland Berger from 2003 until July 2010, when he was appointed head of the supervisory board of the firm. He served as CEO again from May 2013 to July 2014, after his successor/antecessor Martin C. Wittig stepped back due to health reasons. He again served as chairman of the supervisory board until he was appointed chairman of Roland Berger's advisory council in July 2015.

#98

David F. Larcker

#22947

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

David F. Larcker is an American academic and author. He is the James Irvin Miller Professor of Accounting, and director of the Corporate Governance Research Initiative at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, senior faculty of The Arthur and Toni Rembi Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, codirector of the Stanford Directors' Consortium Executive Program and Professor of Law , of Stanford Law School. He also serves as a trustee of the Wells Fargo Advantage Funds.

#99

David Maister

#18610

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

David H. Maister is a former Harvard Business School professor, American writer and expert on business management practices and the management of professional service firms. He is best known for writing Managing the Professional Service Firm and co-writing The Trusted Advisor with Charles H. Green and Robert M. Galford. Born and raised in London, England, Maister became a citizen of the United States in 2006.

#100

Andrew McAfee

#9405

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Andrew Paul McAfee is a principal research scientist at MIT and cofounder and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies how digital technologies are changing the world.

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