Azim Premji is the only Indian to find a mention in this list.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Benjamin Franklin, John D Rockefeller, Thomas Edison and Michael Dell are some prominent American entrepreneurs that have found their place in the list.
In the profile on Premji, Business Week writes of his business acumen, which enabled him to turn the small business he inherited at the age of 21 into a leading IT company. “Premji inherited his father's struggling food oil business when he was a 21-year-old student at Stanford University. Now that business, Wipro, is one of the leading IT companies in India and a growing player in the global market. After making the company profitable and expanding from food oil to other consumer goods, Premji led Wipro into the nascent tech economy in the 1970s,” writes Business Week. On his entreprenurial journey and management style the magazine adds, "He put a premium on quality and standards to build a reputation for Wipro that would reassure Western companies hesitant to move services overseas, a move that helped him land clients like General Electric. Premji is also a hands-on manager involved in the day-to-day operations, even making sales calls himself."
Crediting Muhammad Yunus as a microfinance pioneer Business Week writes, “the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, founded a banking system 30 years ago to lend small amounts of money to the rural poor in Bangladeshi villages. Most of the low-interest microloans go to women, who use them to start their own profit-making enterprises, mainly in agriculture, crafts, or services.” Grameen Bank now has 2,422 branches, employs more than 20,000 people, and has loaned more than $6 billion since its founding, says the magazine.
Other pioneers listed by Business Week include Mayer Amschel Rothschild, John Jacob Astor, Milton Hershey, W K Kellogg, Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart Ray Kroc, Madam C J Walker, Estie Lauder, Ernest Gallo, Thomas Watson Sr, Thomas Watson Jr, Sam Walton, Andy Grove, Ralph Lauren, Martha Stewart, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bezos and Pierre Omidyar.
Business Week, while admitting that the list is subjective, says it "picked the brains of professors, authors and Business Week staffers” to compile the list. On the criterion used to select these titans, the magazine says: if they had the vision to create new markets or tap into underserved markets, changing the way people lived in the process, they were candidates for the honour.
Perhaps many other great Indian entrepreneurs like late Jamshed Ji Tata, Dhirubhai Ambani and Infosys Co-founder Narayan Murthy would have been worthy candidates for the list that relies too heavily on the American giants.
