Smith's Anil Gupta Listed Among World's ‘Best Management Minds’

Anil K. Gupta has been named to Thinkers50 — widely recognized as the world’s first, and definitive, ranking of the top 50 business thinkers.

Gupta, the Michael D. Dingman Chair in Strategy and Entrepreneurship for the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, is among 14 newcomers to the bi-yearly ranking. He enters the list at No. 44. 

The new ranking was unveiled Nov. 11 in London as part of the Thinkers50 Awards Gala. The event culminated a two-year campaign to identify the world’s best management minds. Prior to the unveiling, Gupta participated in a panel discussion themed “The Future of the Enterprise.”

View the entire ranking.

"Anil's inclusion among the world's most influential management thinkers is well deserved and reflective of the quality of our faculty, said Dean Alex Triantis. "Not only is Anil one of the world's foremost experts on innovation and growth, he also is a master educator who brings his research into the classroom and inspires students."

Gupta, along with and Haiyan Wang (MBA ’95), also was a finalist in the Global Solutions Category of the Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards -- widely regarded as the “Oscars of Management Thinking.”

The award's shortlist profile cited Gupta's work in Getting China and India Right (Wiley, 2009); and Tigers in Dragon Land (forthcoming from Wiley): “Rather than viewing each other as competitors, Gupta and Wang argue that China and India’s destinies are entwined and should be the basis for a mutually beneficial trading relationship.”

Gupta, as a Thinkers50 candidate, was selected and judged through a combination of open polling on the Thinkers50 website and input from an international team of advisers. Criteria included originality and practicality of ideas, presentation style, follower loyalty, business sense, international outlook, research rigor and the impact of their ideas.

He already was listed in “Thinkers50 India” as among the best of management thinkers across India and the Indian diaspora, and in 2010, Economist magazine identified Gupta as one of the world’s “rising superstars” in the area of “Innovation in Emerging Economies.” 

Gupta is one of only three professors in the world to have been elected by his academic peers as a Lifetime Fellow of all three of the most prestigious bodies in his field – Academy of Management, Strategic Management Society and Academy of International Business. He also is a regular contributor to World Economic Forum summits including the annual meeting in Davos and the regional meetings in China, India and the Middle East.

The Thinkers50 website recently reposted Gupta's and Wang's blog "Beat the Odds in Cross-Border Joint Ventures," originally featured by Harvard Business Review.