Financial Post: Jim Sutherland
Anyone can call anyone a guru. The six selected here are the real deal, the cream of the crop, our gurus of gurudom.
What makes a guru? Peter Drucker, the original management guru, said people called him that because they didn’t know how to spell “charlatan.” The British magazine Management Today noted that Tom Peters, Drucker’s best known successor, is 50% genius and 50% bullshit artist, “but which bit is which?”
So, yes, there is an elusive quality to the guru business, and perhaps an illusive one too. Yet gurus seem to be something the contemporary world craves. How else to explain liner-notes gurus, snowmobile-clutch gurus and infant-potty-training gurus, all of which apparently exist.
At the same time, there is another class of guru, the five-star kind for whom there is no mistaking gurudom and guru-dumb. The business world loves them. These are the ones who combine intellectual heft with glowing charisma and a startling ability to communicate. Equally important, they cling to a central theme, a core of tenets and beliefs that’s always apparent, even when they’re spinning through more phases than Picasso.
Of course, it’s not just who they are, it’s what they do. Full-fledged gurudom has to be earned, and then maintained. One needs to write books, for example, preferably lots of them, and they really should sell. The website and blog must be as polished as the first paragraph in the first book after the blockbuster. Media appearances help make trends and influence people. And if well-paid speaking engagements don’t follow, true gurudom has not been achieved.
A proper guru will have added at least one word or phrase to the lexicon, even while failing at several other attempts. Academic achievement isn’t absolutely crucial, but academic recognition is. It takes a decade to earn a PhD, a month on the New York Times bestseller list to get an honorary one. Impressive clients are important in that they help pay the bills, but also because they help pad the client list. And whatever one thinks of think tanks, a guru without one needs to rethink the strategy.
Who are the top gurus in Canada when tested against these criteria? It’s a short list no matter whom you follow. But we’ve narrowed our choices to these six: Karim Rashid, Richard Florida, Yvan Allaire, Ron Dembo, Naomi Klein, and Don Tapscott. Call them Canada’s five-star gurus, whether they relish the distinction or not. In these pages you’ll meet each one. But first, a few gross generalizations.
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