Bookshop shelves groan under the weight of management coaching tomes of all styles and sizes. From Peter Drucker’s 600-page classic MBA text Management to a new paperback Are you a Badger or a Doormat? by Rosie Miller, an executive coach, there is no shortage of volunteers ready to teach managers how to lead people, market brands or draw up bottom line-boosting strategies.

But which, if any, of these authors and strategies makes a difference in the real world of business? To answer this question, The Times works with Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer, visiting professors at IE Business School in Madrid and associates at London Business School’s Management Innovation Lab, to compile The Thinkers 50, a biennial list of the most influential living management thinkers.

And this year, for the second time in a row, C. K. Prahalad, author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, has been voted the most influential living management thinker. “His influence on the business world is immense,” Mr Dearlove says.

In 2001, when the list began, Peter Drucker, dubbed “the man who invented management” by BusinessWeek, topped the list. After his death in 2005, Michael Porter, the strategist, took pole position, followed by Professor Prahalad in 2007.

Only 19 of the original 2001 Thinkers 50 are in the 2009 list. Paul Krugman and Don Tapscott, who were included in 2001, return after a break.

While Professor Prahalad retains his crown this year, Professor Porter drops to eleventh position. Other management thinkers who retain positions in the top ten are Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne, Bill Gates (who falls from second to seventh place), Sir Richard Branson and Gary Hamel.

Straight in at third and sixth place this year are two Noble Prize-winners: Professor Krugman and Muhammad Yunus, champion of microcredit and founder of Grameen Bank. The presence of professors Prahalad and Yunus underlines the focus during the recession on what is being called caring capitalism, or “creative capitalism” to use the term preferred by Mr Gates.

Professor Prahalad is one of six Indian-born management thinkers to make the 2009 listing. Joining him are Ratan Tata, chief executive of Tata Industries, at No 12; Ram Charan, executive coach, at No 13; S. (Kris) Gopalakrishnan, founder of Infosys, at No 15; Vijay Govindarajan, of Tuck Business School, at No 24; and Rakesh Khurana, of Harvard Business School, at No 44.

Shooting up the charts from eighteenth to second place is Malcolm Gladwell, a Canadian journalist who has dominated newspaper column inches in the past year with his book on clever people, Outliers.

Including Mr Gladwell, there are 18 non-Americans in the 2009 ranking. Canada is well represented, with four: Mr Gladwell is joined by Roger Martin (a champion of “integrated thinking”), at No 32; Professor Tapscott, at No 39 and Henry Mintzberg, the anti-MBA strategist, at No 33.

Women are under-represented in management, which goes some way to explain why there are only five female management thinkers in the listing.

More than 3,000 people, including timesonline readers, voted in The Thinkers 50. The top 100 thinkers were then assessed against ten criteria, including originality of ideas, impact, presentation style, research rigour and business sense, with business schools and management experts consulted.

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