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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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Business,

#151

Anil Kumar Gupta

Anil Kumar Gupta

#16269

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Anil Kumar Gupta is an Indian scholar in the area of grassroots innovations. He is the founder of the Honey Bee Network. He retired as a full-time professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in 2017, where he served for about 36 years.

#152

Harold Arthur Poling

#27721

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

Harold Arthur "Red" Poling was a U.S. automobile businessman. Early life Harold Arthur Poling was born in Troy, Michigan, but grew up in Fairfax, Virginia. Poling graduated from Monmouth College in 1949. He earned his MBA at Indiana University.

#153

Lucian Bebchuk

#13144

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Lucian Arye Bebchuk is a professor at Harvard Law School focusing on economics and finance. Life and career Bebchuk has a B.A. in mathematics and economics from the University of Haifa , an LL.B. from the University of Tel Aviv , an LL.M. and S.J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics, also from Harvard . He was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1983 to 1985. He joined the Harvard Law faculty in 1986. Bebchuck is the co-author, with Jesse Fried, of Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation.

#154

Peter Linneman

#28542

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Peter Linneman is an American academic who is the principal of Linneman Associates, the CEO and founder of American Land Fund and of KL Realty. He previously served as the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate, Finance, and Public Policy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, retiring in December 2010. Linneman served as the founding chairman of Wharton's Real Estate Department, and was the Director of Wharton's Samuel Zell and Robert Lurie Real Estate Center for 13 years. He is also the founding co-editor of the Wharton Real Estate Review. Li...

#155

Michael Czinkota

Michael Czinkota

#33660

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Michael R. Czinkota is an American organizational theorist and Professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. Czinkota is the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the United States Department of Commerce and a former head of U.S. delegation for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Industry Committee in Paris . From 1986-1987, Czinkota was a Senior Advisor for Export Controls in the U.S. Department of Commerce. Czinkota was awarded the Significant Contribution to Global Marketing award from the American Marketing Association in 2007.

#156

G. "Anand" Anandalingam

#27705

Overall Influence

G. "Anand" Anandalingam is currently Ralph J. Tyser Professor of Management Science at the University of Maryland. He was dean of Imperial College Business School at Imperial College London from 2013 to 2017. Prior to that, from 2008 to 2013, he was dean of Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Before joining the Smith School in 2001, Anandalingam worked at the University of Pennsylvania.

#157

Rajan Saxena

#15988

Overall Influence

Rajan Saxena is an Indian management expert, academic & writer. He is a former Vice-Chancellor of the SVKM's NMIMS, a deemed university in Mumbai, a former Director of Indian Institute of Management, Indore, S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research and ICFAI Business School, Gurgaon. He is also a recipient of the BERG Education Award for 2014.

#158

Hossein Abdoh Tabrizi

#34273

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Hossein Abdoh Tabrizi is an Iranian professor of Finance and a financial practitioner. Since 2013, he is an Honorary Adviser to Minister of Roads and Urban Development and a member of Iranian Securities and Exchange Commission. He was the founder of Eghtesad Novin Bank, the first Iranian non-governmental bank, and a member of editorial board of various financial journals and the founder and owner of Sarmayeh newspaper. He also had several positions including the Secretary General of Tehran Stock Exchange , adviser to the Minister of Economic Affairs and Finance and many different posts in...

#159

William Henry Danforth

#10673

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

William Henry Danforth II was an American physician, professor of medicine, academic administrator, and philanthropist. He was chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis from 1971 until 1995. Danforth was the grandson of Ralston-Purina founder and St. Louis businessman William H. Danforth, and the brother of former U.S. Senator John Danforth.

#160

Fred Luthans

#15747

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Fred Luthans is a management professor specializing in organizational behavior. He is the University and George Holmes Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

#161

Ram Charan

#35095

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Ram Charan is an Indian-American business consultant, speaker, and writer resident in Dallas, Texas. Career Charan has consulted for companies such as GE, KLM, Bank of America, Praxair and Jaypee Associates. He is the author of various books on business, including Talent Masters, Leaders At All Levels, Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times, Boards That Deliver, What The CEO Wants You To Know, Boards At Work, Every Business Is A Growth Business , Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business, Confronting Reality, Know How a...

#162

Robert R. Blake

#30711

Overall Influence

1918 - 2004 (86 years)

Robert Rogers Blake was an American management theoretician. He did pioneer work in the field of organizational dynamics. Together with Jane S. Mouton, he developed the Managerial Grid Model , which attempts to conceptualize management in terms of relations and leadership style.

#163

Dariusz Jemielniak

Dariusz Jemielniak

#9484

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (49 years)

Dariusz Jemielniak is a professor of management at Kozminski University, faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and vice-president of Polish Academy of Sciences.

#164

Kenneth Morse

#32291

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Kenneth Paul Morse was an early employee at Aspen Technology, Inc., and four other startups. He is the former managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, and chairman of Entrepreneurship Ventures, Inc. He holds the chair in Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Competitiveness at Delft University of Technology.

#165

Daniel A. Wren

#30094

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Daniel A. Wren is an American business theorist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Oklahoma, especially known for his 1972 book coauthored with Arthur G. Bedeian, entitled "The evolution of management thought."

#166

Gen Urobuchi

#3500

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

is a Japanese novelist, visual novel writer and anime screenwriter. He is known for being the co-creator of the highly acclaimed and commercially successful anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which earned him the Tokyo Anime Award for Best Scriptwriter, as well as the writer of the 2003 visual novel Saya no Uta, the 2012 anime Psycho-Pass, the light novel and anime Fate/Zero, and the 2013–2014 tokusatsu show Kamen Rider Gaim. He currently works at Nitroplus and Nitro+chiral. Anime written by Urobuchi that have won the Newtype Anime Awards have been Puella Magi Madoka Magica in 2011, Fate/...

#167

Monika Kostera

#18813

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Monika Maria Kostera is a Polish sociologist of management. She is known for her contribution to organization theory, organizational archetypes and myths, storytelling and narrative analysis in organizational anthropology. She holds professorships at University of Warsaw, Södertörn University in Sweden and Institut Mines-Télécom Business School in France.

#168

Venkatesh Shankar

Venkatesh Shankar

#37119

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Venkatesh Shankar is an American marketing professor, consultant and author. He is currently Professor of Marketing, Ford Chair in Marketing & E-Commerce at Mays Business School, Texas A&M University. He is the co-editor of the Handbook of Marketing Strategy and the author of Shopper Marketing.

#169

H. Naylor Fitzhugh

#35971

Overall Influence

1909 - 1992 (83 years)

Howard Naylor Fitzhugh was an American academic and one of the first African-American graduates of Harvard Business School. Fitzhugh is credited with creating the concept of target marketing. Early life Fitzhugh was born on October 31, 1909, in Washington, D.C. He earned a full scholarship to Harvard at the age of sixteen while still a student at Dunbar High School. Fitzhugh, intent on becoming a doctor, studied science and graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 1930. Three years later, he earned his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1933.

#170

Douglas A. Shackelford

#33004

Overall Influence

Douglas A. Shackelford is an American professor and academic administrator. He served as the dean of the Kenan–Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until September of 2022, where he is also the Meade H. Willis Distinguished Professor of Taxation.

#171

Stephen Taylor

#45926

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (123 years)

Stephen Taylor is a senior lecturer in Human Resource Management at the University of Exeter Business School. He is a chief examiner for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development , being responsible for the Employment Law, Managing in a Strategic Context and Leading, Managing & Developing People papers. He formerly taught at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School and at Manchester Business School.

#172

José Viñals

#23308

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

José Maria Viñals Íñiguez is a Spanish economist and businessman. He serves as Group Chairman of Standard Chartered and Chairman of Standard Chartered Bank, the United Kingdom subsidiary of Standard Chartered.

#173

Ram Mudambi

#27926

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Ram Mudambi is the Frank M. Speakman Professor of Strategy at the Fox School of Business and Management at Temple University. He has published over a hundred refereed journal articles and six books on the multinational strategies of entrepreneurial firms; the location and research and development strategies of multinational firmss, and the politics of international business. Mudambi serves as a co-editor of the Global Strategy Journal published by the Strategic Management Society . He also serves as a department editor at the Journal of International Business Policy published by the Academy of International Business .

#174

Michael Power

#38964

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Michael Kevin Power FBA is professor of accounting at the London School of Economics. He is a fellow of the British Academy an academic governor of the LSE, and a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales .

#175

Ann Langley

#37034

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Ann Langley is a British-Canadian economist. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Strategic Management Research in a Pluralistic Environment at HEC Montréal. She is a Distinguished Research Environment Professor at Warwick Business School and an adjunct professor at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, the University of Montreal, and the University of Gothenburg. Langley is interested in strategy, health management and research methodology.

#176

Len Jessup

#11321

Overall Influence

Leonard Michael Jessup is an American academic administrator. He served as the tenth president of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas from 2015 to 2018, when he became the president of Claremont Graduate University.

#177

Peter Buckley

#34318

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Peter Jennings Buckley is Professor of International Business at the University of Leeds and director of the Centre for International Business at the University of Leeds . Buckley was educated at Ashton-under-Lyne Grammar School and graduated from the University of York with a BA in social sciences in 1970. He also has an MA in development economics from the University of East Anglia and a PhD in economics from the University of Lancaster. In 2010 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Faculty of Economics at Uppsala University, Sweden.

#178

John W. Pratt

#16518

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

John Winsor Pratt is Emeritus William Ziegler professor business administration at Harvard University. His former education was conducted at Princeton University and Stanford University, where he specialized in mathematics and statistics. Pratt spent most of his academic career at Harvard University. He was an editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association from 1965 to 1970. His researches on risk aversion, risk sharing incentives, and the nature and discovery of stochastic laws, statistical relationships that describe the effects of decisions. He has made contributions to rese...

#179

Patricia Daugherty

#25519

Overall Influence

Patricia Joan Daugherty is a retired American management scientist specializing in logistics, supply chains, and cooperation. She has been Siegfried Chair in Marketing at the University of Oklahoma, Bowersox–Thull Chair in Logistics and Supply Chain Management at Michigan State University, and Debbie and Jerry Ivy Chair in Business at Iowa State University.

#180

Jaideep Prabhu

#38519

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Jaideep Prabhu is the Jawaharlal Nehru professor of business and enterprise at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, England. The Professorship was established by the Government of India with an endowment of £3.2 million. Prabhu is also the director of the Centre for India & Global Business . He is the co-author of Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth, described by The Economist as "the most comprehensive book" on the subject of frugal innovation.

#181

Ludovic Phalippou

#34975

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Ludovic Phalippou is a French financial economist. He is a Professor of Financial Economics and the Academic Area Head of the Finance, Accounting & Economics group at University of Oxford Saïd Business School. Phalippou specializes in the institutional investor related areas of private equity, including risk management, return benchmarking, legal and governance issues, liquidity and measurement of returns. He is the author of the book, Private Equity Laid Bare, now in its third edition, and host a podcast with the same name.

#182

Richard Whittington

#41240

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Richard Whittington is an academic in the area of Corporate Strategy. Currently, he is a Professor of Strategic Management at the Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. Whittington has been influential in the Strategy-as-Practice approach, a more sociological and less managerial approach to the study of business and corporate strategy. He was previously an Associate Editor at the Strategic Management Journal.

#183

Katy Milkman

#10464

Overall Influence

Katherine L. Milkman is an American economist who is the James G. Dinan endowed Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.

#184

Raghu Sundaram

#24568

Overall Influence

Rangarajan K. "Raghu" Sundaram is an Indian-born American academic. He is the Dean of the New York University Stern School of Business, and the author or co-author of two books. Early life Sundaram was educated in India, where he earned a Bachelor's degree from the University of Madras in 1982 and a master in business administration from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad in 1984. He earned a master's degree and a PhD in Economics from Cornell University in 1987 and 1988 respectively.

#185

Lawrence Welch

#42050

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Lawrence S. Welch is an Australian organisational theorist, Professor of International Business at the Melbourne Business School, known for his work on internationalization and international business operations.

#186

Alice Eagly

#31325

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Alice H. Eagly is the James Padilla Chair of Arts and Sciences Emerita and emerita professor of psychology at Northwestern University. She is also a fellow at the Institute of Policy Research at Northwestern University. Her primary research focus is social psychology, as well as personality psychology and Industrial Organizational Psychology. She was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.

#187

Michael A. Cusumano

#30538

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Michael A. Cusumano is the Sloan Management Review Distinguished Professor and Deputy Dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Previously he held a joint appointment in the MIT School of Engineering, Division of Engineering Systems. Professor Cusumano specializes in strategy, product development, and entrepreneurship in computer software as well as automobiles and consumer electronics. At MIT, he has recently taught Platform Strategy & Entrepreneurship as well as Strategy & the CEO. During 2016–17, he was on leave as Special Vice President and Dean of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Initiat...

#188

Richard L. Daft

Richard L. Daft

#25379

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Richard L. Daft is an American organizational theorist and the Brownlee O. Currey, Jr. Professor of Management at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University. Biography Daft holds a B.S. from the University of Nebraska, an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

#189

Harold Pollack

#17528

Overall Influence

Harold Pollack is an American professor at the University of Chicago who has been appointed to two Institute of Medicine committees. His research has focused on public health and health policy. At the University of Chicago, he has chaired the Center for Health Administration Studies. A special correspondent for the New Republic during 2009 and 2010, he writes frequently about public policy for a variety of national publications. Pollack is a frequent contributor to Healthinsurance.org, where he has conducted interviews with other prominent health policy bloggers, including Jonathan Cohn. He i...

#190

H. Thomas Johnson

#39287

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

H. Thomas Johnson is an American accounting historian, and Professor of Business Administration at Portland State University, known for his work on the history of accounting and accounting thought Life and work Johnson obtained his BA in economics from Harvard University and his MBA in accounting from Rutgers University. He obtained a PhD in economic history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He went on to earn a Certified Public Accountant license.

#191

Frank T. Rothaermel

#25046

Overall Influence

Frank T. Rothaermel is a professor in the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology and an Alfred P. Sloan Industry Studies Fellow. He holds the Russell and Nancy McDonough Chair of Business.

#192

Jeanne W. Ross

#24361

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Jeanne Wenzel Ross is an American organizational theorist and principal research scientist at MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Center for Information Systems Research , specializes in Enterprise Architecture, ICT and Management. She is known for her work on IT governance, and Enterprise architecture.

#193

Dennis H. Holtschneider

Dennis H. Holtschneider

#14082

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Dennis Henry Holtschneider is president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. Previously, he was the executive vice president and chief operations officer for Ascension Health, serving from July 2017 through June 2019. Prior to this, he served as president of DePaul University in Chicago, United States, serving from July 2004 through June 2017.

#194

Eli Noam

#18913

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Eli M. Noam is a professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, and holds the Paul Garrett Chair in Public Policy and Business Responsibility. He is the director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information . He works on the economics, management, and policy of media and the digital world, most recently on global media ownership and on next-generation “Cloud-TV”. He has written over 400 articles and has authored, edited, and co-edited over 30 books.

#195

Serguei Netessine

#39194

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Serguei Netessine is a scientist, educator, academic administrator and startup investor. He is Senior Vice Dean for Innovation and Global Initiatives and Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. Previously, he was Professor of Global Technology and Innovation at INSEAD and the Research Director of INSEAD-Wharton alliance. He is best known for his work on Business Model Innovation, Operational Excellence and Supply Chain Management.

#196

Chris Argyris

#47027

Overall Influence

1923 - 2013 (90 years)

Chris Argyris was an American business theorist and professor at Yale School of Management and Harvard Business School. Argyris, like Richard Beckhard, Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis, is known as a co-founder of organization development, and known for seminal work on learning organizations.

#197

Anthony Saunders

#32381

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Anthony Saunders is the John M. Schiff Professor of Finance at New York University Stern School of Business and is currently on the Executive Committee of the Salomon Center of the Study of Financial Institutions.

#198

Rajendra Srivastava

#38881

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Rajendra K. Srivastava is Novartis Professor of Marketing Strategy and Innovation at the Indian School of Business. He has been a tenured professor and an academic administrator and has worked in the United States, Singapore, and India. He has been listed in the Forbes's Tycoons of Tomorrow 2018. He is also a member of the board of directors of Happiest Minds, a publicly listed company in India.

#199

Joey Wat

#40326

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Joey Chui Yung Wat is a chief executive officer of Yum China Holdings, Inc. . She also served as CEO of KFC China, managing director of A.S. Watson Group UK, and spent seven years in management consulting.

#200

Charles J. Hitch

#15690

Overall Influence

1910 - 1995 (85 years)

Charles J. Hitch was an American economist and Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1965. He later served as vice chancellor and president of the University of California and president of Resources for the Future .

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