Deciding who the gurus are in KM is a subjective matter, but our work consistently mentioned the names of the individuals listed below. There were also other important KM personalities that appear regularly or have gained recognition in their field. Their biographies have been placed on another page for your convenience.

The Top Five Gurus

Ikujiro Nonaka was appointed to the Xerox Distinguished Professorship in Knowedge at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997. He is also the Founding Dean of the Graduate School of Knowledge Science at Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST). He has authored and co-authored several award-winning books, including (with Hirotaka Takeuchi) The Knowledge Creating Company (Oxford University Press, 1995). And he has written highly acclaimed articles in academic and managerial journals both in Japan and overseas. He edits several international journals and designs international seminars for managers.

Thomas H. Davenport is the Curtis Mathes Fellowship Professor and Director of the Information Management MBA program at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book (co-authored with Laurence Prusak) is Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (Harvard Business School Press, 1998)

Laurence Prusak is a Managing Principal with IBM Consulting Group in Boston, where he leads the group’s research and consults on organizational knowledge issues. He has published widely and has recently co-authored two books with Tom Davenport, Information Ecology (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Working Knowledge (Harvard Business School  Press, 1998), and he has edited the anthology Knowledge in Organizations (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997). Prior to joining IBM, he was a Principal in Ernst & Young’s Center for Business Innovation, specializing in issues of corporate knowledge management. He is a visiting faculty member of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College.

John Seely Brown is Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His personal research interests include digital culture, ubiquitous computing, user-centering design, and organizational and individual learning. He is a co-founder of the Institute for Research on Learning, a non-profit institute for addressing the problems of lifelong-learning. He has published over 90 papers in scientific journals and was awarded the Harvard Business Review’s 1991 McKinsey Award for his article, "Research that Reinvents the Corporation." He is the editor of Seeing Differently: Insights on Innovation (Harvard Business School Press, 1997).

Peter F. Drucker - From 1950-1971, Dr. Drucker was Professor of Management at the Graduate Business School of New York University, which awarded him in 1969 the university's highest honor, the Presidential Citation. Since 1971, he has been the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, CA. The school named its Graduate Management Center after him in 1987.  Dr. Drucker is a consultant specializing in strategy and policy for both businesses and non profits, and in the work and organization of top management. He has worked with many of the world's largest corporations and with small and entrepreneurial companies; with non profits such as universities, hospitals, churches and community services; and with agencies of the US government as well as free world governments. He is the honorary Chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Non Profit Management.  A prolific writer, Dr. Drucker has published 28 books which have been translated into more than twenty languages. He is also an editorial columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to magazines. (This biography was taken from http://www2.dgsys.com/~tristan/technodrucker.html)

See Other Important KM Personalities

Bios were taken from the California Management Review Special issue on Knowledge and the Firm. Volume 40. Number 3. Spring 1998.