In a recent article, The Deal takes the Wall St. Journal to task for ranking top business gurus. Entitled, “The wisdom racket (updated): The Wall St. Journal Discovers the Ingredients for Gurudum: Thin, Trendy, and Obvious and M&A Reporters Offer Dueling Punditry,” The Deal said it noted “three signs of the apocalypse in a single story” because the Journal:

1. Presented the entire article on the front page of the Journal’s Marketplace section.
2. The methodology behind the ranking, which basically consisted of tallying up the “Google hits, media mentions and academic citations” scored by a list of influential business thinkers.
3. And then the list includes NY Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, in spots No. 2 and No. 4, respectively. Meanwhile Michael Porter and Tom Peters, who topped a similar list in 2003, fell to Nos. 14 and 18, respectively.

Ok, I don’t agree these are signs of the apocalypse, but I do have to agree that ranking based on Google hits isn’t necessarily the most scientific method to ranking gurus by impact.

The article is available here.