Where have all the management gurus gone?

Sukumar Ranganathan — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 05:10:00 GMT

Under News

The latest issue of Fortune has a nice article on 10 management gurus to watch. It's a good list, if only because most people, including this blogger had started thinking that there were no new gurus on the circuit.
India hasn't had much luck in creating management gurus. MB Athreya can claim to be the country's first management guru although some people claim that the business of management consulting in India was founded by ~~the late~~ (author's note: corrected on 9 December) MK Raju. Raju used to be the managing director of the Chennnai-based India Pistons Ltd in the 1960s. One of his proteges in that company would go on to become one of the world's best known management gurus -- C K Prahalad . But that wouldn't happen till the 1990s by which time Raju, then running an eponymous management consulting firm in Chennai was largely forgotten. India Pistons in the 1960s used to be one of the best run companies in the country. Many of its practices were ahead of their time. In the early 1960s, the company had a management trainee programme, probably the first in the country, and used management games and simulation exercises.
Two young professors MB Sarkar at the Fox School of Business in Philadelphia and Charles Dhanaraj at the Richard Ivey School of Business in Ontario, Canada say that India doesn't have management gurus because it doesn't have the intellectual and educational environment required to create them. They may have a point. Prahalad, and Bala Balachandran and Vijay Govindarajan, two other management gurus of Indian origin achieved this status in the US. Sarkar and Dhanaraj have plans to launch a programme that is part accelerator, part angel fund, and partly a forum where Indian management research scholars can bounce ideas and theories off the best minds -- in academia and in business.

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Where have all the management gurus gone?