Smith’s Anil Gupta Rises in Thinkers50

Representing the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, strategy experts Anil K. Gupta and Haiyan Wang are 28th in the 2017 Thinkers50 ranking of the “world’s most influential living management thinkers.”

Gupta (No. 47 in the previous, 2015, ranking) and Wang “have coauthored several highly influential books including "The Quest for Global Dominance," "Getting China and India Right," and "The Silk Road Rediscovered,” according to a profile of the pair posted at the Thinkers50 website. The ranking has been published every two years since 2001 by British business consultants and authors Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove. They tout the compilation as “the essential guide to which business thinkers and ideas are in – and which have been consigned to business history.”

Gupta, the Smith School’s Michael D. Dingman Chair in Strategy, Globalization and Entrepreneurship, also has been named by The Economist as one of the world’s “rising superstars.” And, he is one of only three professors in the world — out of about 25,000 — to be elected by peers as a Lifetime Fellow of each of the three most prestigious academic bodies in the management field: Academy of Management, Strategic Management Society and Academy of International Business. Gupta is also an invited member of The Bretton Woods Committee, the CNBC Disruptors50 Advisory Council, as well as the World Economic Forum's Stewardship Board for the Future Consumption.

Wang, a Smith School MBA alumnus, is managing partner of the D.C.-based research consultancy The China India Institute. Also an adjunct professor of strategy at INSEAD, she has been listed by Thinkers50 in a category called “On the Guru Radar” and shortlisted for the 2011 “Global Village Award.”