We’ve compiled our list of the top thought leaders and experts that are teaching leadership all over the world today.
Several factors were taken into account when building this list,
including the experts popularity, the uniqueness & newness of their
message, and how much time they spend out of their home country.
Have fun looking over the list and send us any new recommendations.
R. Michael Anderson
R. Michael Anderson makes this
list based on the strength of two factors; the amount of international
speaking and training he does and the uniqueness of his material.
As an American who lives in the UK, he’s often seen speaking all around Europe as well as the Middle East and South-East Asia.
He’s the only person on this list that has the real-world experience of founding, scaling, and exiting three software companies when he lived in California, he also has the theoretical background of holding advanced degrees in psychology and neuroscience.
Audiences love his evidence-based approach mixed with his vulnerable and authentic stories. Learn more about Michael at www.RMichaelAnderson.com.
Marshall Goldsmith
As the founder of executive coaching firm Marshall Goldsmith Partners
LLC. Goldsmith has worked closely with more than 120 major CEOs and
their management teams during his career and is named by Forbes as one
of the five most respected executive coaches.
Marshall Goldsmith is the million-selling author or editor of 31
management related books, including the New York Times and Wall Street
Journal bestsellers MOJO, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, and Triggers.
He was recognized as the #1 Leadership Thinker in the World and one
of the top five Management Thinkers in 2015, as well as one of the top
ten Most-Influential Business Thinkers and the top-ranked executive
coach at the 2013 biennial Thinkers50.
Marshall’s mission is simple; to help successful people achieve
positive, lasting change in behavior; for themselves, their people, and
their teams.
The Wall Street Journal ranks him among the top 10 executive educators.
John C. Maxwell
John C. Maxwell is internationally recognized as the best leadership
speaker, trainer and author who has written over 70 books and sold more
than 24 million books in 50 languages. Maxwell was named the No. 1
leadership and management expert in the world by Inc. Magazine.
Maxwell is a best-selling author in the New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, and Business Week and is also a Hall of Famer of Amazon.com.
Although not all of the ideas of John Maxwell are really unique, he
has a brilliant way of storytelling and a supernatural ability to make
complicated ideas easy to understand. He is a global top leadership guru
because he thoroughly researches proven concepts and creates structures
and narratives that support Leadership Development.
In addition, he has founded a non-profit organization, EQUIP, that
has trained more than 6 million leaders in 196 countries worldwide and
has he been voted the consistent number one Leadership Guru on the
Global Gurus sites six years in a row.
Identified by many as the most recognizable face in leadership today
and over the past generation, John Maxwell is described as an uplifting
speaker and trainer that’s good at the “nuts and bolts” of leadership.
Ken Blanchard
Few people have influenced the day-to-day management of people and
companies more than Ken Blanchard. A prominent sought-after author,
speaker, and business consultant, Blanchard is universally characterized
as one of the most insightful, powerful, and compassionate individuals
in business today.
Ken is one of the most influential leadership experts in the world
and is respected for his years of groundbreaking work in the fields of
leadership and management.
For more than 35 years, Blanchard has been creating the best managers
in the world, training over 150,000 people each year. From the
award-winning First-time Manager program—based on the best-selling
business book, The New One Minute Manager®—to Situational
Leadership® II, the most widely taught leadership model in the world,
Blanchard is the provider of choice for Fortune 500 companies as well as
small to medium businesses, governments, and educational and nonprofit
organizations.
Ken Blanchard may just be the godfather of Leadership and Management.
Earlier in his career, he would have had the top spot. But because he’s
scaled back his international speaking, we are putting him at #3.
Simon Sinek
Described as “a visionary thinker with a rare intellect,” Sinek
teaches leaders and organizations how to inspire people. With a bold
goal to help build a world in which the vast majority of people go home
everyday feeling fulfilled by their work, Sinek is leading a movement to
inspire people to do the things that inspire them.
In his career Sinek has discovered some remarkable patterns in how we think, act, and communicate. He wrote Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
to explore his idea of The Golden Circle, what he calls “a naturally
occurring pattern, grounded in the biology of human decision making that
explains why we are inspired by some people, leaders, messages and
organizations over others.”
His talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” is listed as the third most popular TED presentation of all time.
Robin Sharma
Ranked as one of the Top 5 leadership gurus in the world in an
independent global survey of over 22,000 businesspeople, Sharma will
help your people perform brilliantly and leave everything they touch
better than they find it.
His mantra is that everyone, regardless of title, must be a leader in
the new economy. They should take up challenges of personal excellence
and do what is required.
Sharma has published 12 leadership related books and founded the leadership training firm Sharma Leadership International.
As a speaker, he is dynamic and structured providing presentations based on his book, The Leader Who Had No Title, in which he delivers the message that anyone in any role can be a leader.
Robin Sharma is consistently voted in the top 10 of the best leadership speakers and trainers.
Jack Welch
Jack Welch is one of the world’s most respected and celebrated CEOs,
best known for serving as Chairman and CEO of General Electric (GE) from
1981 to 2001.
Named “Manager of the Century” by Fortune Magazine, in his 21 years
as CEO, Jack transformed GE into the world’s most admired and successful
company with his innovative management techniques. His achievements are
considered epic and, as a result, thousands of companies around the
world have adopted his methodologies.
In addition to holding the distinction of being the youngest CEO at
GE, Jack has also written two New York Times best-selling business
books, wrote a regular column for Businessweek magazine, and is
frequently called upon as a commentator for various business programs on
TV.
Jack goes beyond the principles of leadership and management everyone
talks about. His ideas and processes are surely his own style and we
give him full marks for his unique methodology of leadership training
and development.
Welch is now the Executive Chairman of the Jack Welch Management
Institute at Strayer University dedicated to giving students globally
and at every career level the tools to transform their lives and
organizations
Jim Collins
Jim Collins is a business consultant, author, and speaker on leadership and company sustainability and growth.
His talent and guru factor comes from his ability to research and put
that research data into an easy to understand format. Jim’s
contributions to leaders around the world have helped them sustain
superior success. His uniqueness is not from the content he creates but
in his approach to gathering valuable information.
In 1995, he founded a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado,
where he conducts research and engages in Socratic dialogue with CEOs
and senior-leadership teams.
Having invested a quarter century researching the topic, he has
authored or coauthored six books that have sold in total more than 10
million copies worldwide, including leadership classics such as, Built to Last and Good to Great.
His newest release, Great by Choice, answers the penetrating question, Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?
Jim Collins is a fact based speaker and uses that to inspire
audiences into taking the required steps to creating and sustaining
great organizations.
Tom Peters
Tom Peters is described as one of the most influential business
thinkers of all time and one of the best leadership speakers in the
world. He became world famous when he wrote his best-known book In Search of Excellence with Robert Waterman.
In Search of Excellence is famous as the book that changed
the way the world does business and often tagged as the best business
book ever. Sixteen books and nearly thirty years later, he’s still at
the forefront of the “management guru industry” that he single-handedly
invented.
He is regularly included among top business authorities including his
second place rank in Accenture’s top 50 business intellectuals.
Patrick Lencioni
Named in Fortune magazine as one of the “ten new gurus you should
know,” Patrick Lencioni is the founder of The Table Group and the author
of 10 books which have sold over 4 million copies and been translated
into more than 25 languages.
Lencioni is a writer of books on business management, particularly in
relation to team management. He is best known as the author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a popular business tale that explores work team dynamics and offers solutions to help teams perform better
In his career, Lencioni has also written for or been featured in
numerous publications including Harvard Business Review, Inc., Fortune,
Fast Company, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and Businessweek.
Patrick is president of The Table Group, a management consulting firm
specializing in executive team development and organizational health.
As a consultant, he has worked with senior executives and executive
teams in organizations ranging from Fortune 500s and high tech start-ups
to universities and non-profits. He also gives talks on leadership,
organizational change, teamwork, and corporate culture
Consistently the top rated keynote speaker at major conferences, he
shares his models and inspires his audiences through his accessibility,
humor, and storytelling.
The Wall Street Journal called him one of the most sought after business speakers in America.
