Robert Heller, founder of Management Today magazine and business partner of Edward de Bono, does not issue a Top 10 list of his favourite management gurus. However, his choices for the gurus featured in his Business Masterclasses series gives an indication of who he thinks are the greats:

If any one person can be said to symbolize the change in the way we think about and furnish our homes, it is Sir Terence Conran - designer, furniture-maker, restaurateur and retailer. In 1964, he founded Habitat, the store that revolutionized home furnishings long before IKEA entered the British market in 1987. Today, the man who founded the world’s first Design Museum in 1989, is throwing his weight solidly behind the sustainability cause. “Sustainability is the new normal,” says Conran. He passionately believes that buildings are responsible for a far greater proportion of the carbon dioxide emissions that get pumped into the atmosphere every year, than cars, planes or factories. Designers, he says, have a responsibility to find eco-friendly solutions to the serious and real problems that threaten future generations.

When Howard Gardner first formulated his theory of multiple intelligences in Frames of Mind , he offered seven core intelligences: Linguistic intelligence - sensitivity to spoken and written language, the ability to learn languages, and the capacity to use language. Writers, poets, lawyers and speakers have high linguistic intelligence; Logical-mathematical intelligence - the capacity to analyze problems logically, solve maths problems and detect patterns. Scientists and mathematicians have high logical-mathematical intelligence; Musical intelligence - skill in the performance, composition, appreciation of musical patterns. Very closely associated with linguistic intelligence; Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence - the potential of using one's whole body to solve problems, the ability to use mental abilities to coordinate bodily movements. Mental and physical activity are closely related; Spatial intelligence - the potential to recognize and use the patterns of wide space and more confined areas; Interpersonal intelligence - the capacity to understand intentions, motivations and desires of others. Educators, salespeople, religious and political leaders and counsellors need interpersonal intelligence; and Intrapersonal intelligence - the capacity to understand oneself, to appreciate feelings, fears and motivations, to have an effective working model of ourselves that regulates our lives.

An adorable little girl faces the camera and spends over two minutes relating in detail how she was teased by a boy in Burger King for being Chinese, and how he threw some French fries in her hair. As Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman say in NurtureShock, we need to know whether she is telling the truth or lying because over 100,000 children testify in American courts every year, usually in custody disputes and abuse cases. How well do judges assess the truthfulness of these kids? In addition to the little Chinese girl, seven other kids aged seven to eleven years appeared in video segments. All the kids had been coached by their parents to prepare a true story and a fabricated tale, and told both stories to the interviewer on camera. The interviewer did not know which story was true. Eight of the children’s stories were chosen randomly.

I have to admit that I was not predisposed to like Po Bronson. Many people have raved about his previous book, What should I do with my life, which I found irritating. However, I did find his story of the Academy of the Pacific Rim in Boston fascinating. The school was founded by a Harvard Business School graduate who was interested in educational reform, and was inspired by Asian educational techniques that he saw during a visit to Japan.