Most influential business leader

1. Bill Gates
2. Jack Welch
3. Henry Ford
4. Alfred P. Sloan
5. Thomas J. Watson

The runner-up to Gates was General Electric CEO Jack Welch. "Welch turned around a giant in a way few have and redesigned what a major corporation can be," as one alumnus put it. Added another, "Welch's vision of a nonbureaucratic large organization makes GE the business everyone wants to copy or raid for talent."

Legendary carmaker Henry Ford finished third. Like Gates, Ford manufactured a product that changed the world by dint of its pervasiveness and indispensability. But as some noted, Ford also introduced revolutionary management, workplace, and business innovations that in and of themselves transformed the worlds of work and leisure. As one respondent said, "Henry Ford, for the auto itself and his influence on the work force," while another noted Ford's "perfection of the use of interchangeable parts and the assembly line, concepts employed by essentially all of business today."

Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors, who "did the most to implement modern management methods in American business," finished fourth, followed by IBM's Thomas J. Watson, whose "computers enabled the automation of well-informed decision-making, allowing business and the work force to migrate from manual labor in a stable market to development work in a rapidly evolving society."

Among dozens of other leaders cited were W. Edwards Deming, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, Sam Walton, J.P. Morgan, Martin Luther King, John D. Rockefeller, and Peter Drucker. Also mentioned were Bernard Baruch, Oprah Winfrey, Howard Hughes, and Ben and Jerry.

Who's Number One?

In selecting the "most influential business leader" of the last 75 years, HBS alumni, graduates of America's best-known school of management, chose a college dropout with no formal business or management training. That in-dividual would of course be Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, who put in just one year at Harvard College before retreating westward to lay the groundwork for the computer revolution.

HBS alumni selected Gates, barely twenty years old and a business neophyte when he cofounded Microsoft in 1975, even though the company he started has been in business less than 25 years. That's a relative blink of an eye compared with some of the enduring Fortune 500 powerhouses that can trace their roots back to the turn of the century - firms that helped make this the prosperous and powerful "American century."

Yet alumni of all ages were convincingly behind Gates, albeit sometimes grudgingly ("I pick Bill Gates, not necessarily from a moral character or leadership standpoint, but from an Œinfluential' product penetration standpoint"). More typical were responses such as "Gates made the PC revolution possible" and "no single individual has achieved so much in such a short time," with "Microsoft's technology accelerating the world economy."