Miracle Cures: The "new" Wall Street Journal Falls Short

Here's something we don't see all that often: three signs of the apocalypse in a single story.

It happened last week in The Wall Street Journal, which produced a bizarre little ranking of "business gurus" for its Marketplace section -- and presented it in a short story that ran in its entirety on the section's front page (sign No. 1).

We knew we were in for a weird one when we came across the explanation of 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 (sign No. 2). How very scientific. And then there's the list itself (sign No. 3), which includes New York 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.

Given the ranking's reliance on Googleability and media mentions as key measures of influence, it's not surprising that journalists at two powerful publications would place high on the list; just having a byline is enough to give any working journalist an Internet presence these days. But it's sort of depressing, too. Friedman has gained a business following by pointing out the importance of globalization -- not exactly a shocker -- while Gladwell has extolled the virtues of snap judgments. It's as if businesspeople only want to hear from gurus who will repeat back to them what they already sort of know.

According to the Journal, Thomas Davenport (pictured), a Babson College professor who compiled the ranking, says "time-strapped managers are hungry for easily digestible advice wherever they can find it. ... Traditional business gurus writing 'weighty tomes' are in decline." But Davenport actually has much more thoughtful things to say about his ranking. Sadly absent from the Journal's no-jump story, which seemed more interested in running sketches of the top five gurus and quoting from their work than providing any actual analysis of the ranking, Davenport's additional comments can be found on a blog he wrote for Harvard Business Online.

For one thing, Davenport notes, "the list is not a ranking of the quality of the ideas. A high-ranking management guru has to be a good promoter as well as a good researcher and sound thinker." And he attributes the ascension of journalists in part to businesspeople's shrinking attention spans. "Many of them want few academic details and an entertaining story, which these journalists know how to provide," he writes. "I don't always agree with the quality of Gladwell's evidence, but I am certainly impressed by his writing ability. Some of Friedman's ideas seem quite obvious to me, but he knows how to put together a sentence. That didn't matter much in the old days of management gurudom, but it seems much more important now."

Davenport's blog comments also seem like fodder for a much more interesting ranking story than the one the Journal produced.

It's inevitable that when two M&A columnists write on the same day, they will tackle nearly the same subject. Last Tuesday, The New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin and the Wall Street Journal's Dennis Berman both weighed in on deals not done, but from decidedly different points of view. Sorkin skewered Microsoft Corp.'s Steve Ballmer for walking away from his unsolicited bid for Yahoo! Inc.; Berman celebrated Continental Airlines Inc.'s Larry Kellner for choosing not to merge with United Air Lines parent UAL Corp.

What is most striking is the two columnists' divergent takes on the advisers in these two near deals. Sorkin maintains that Ballmer's biggest problem (as well as Yahoo!'s) was that he did not listen to his army of advisers. "Say what you want about bankers, but they at least are good at parroting the markets," Sorkin writes. But Berman is glad Kellner essentially flipped the bird to his advisers, as well as investors, analysts and the media. "The Deal Machine prodded and pushed, but quite incredibly Mr. Kellner said no," Berman writes. This is some feat, he adds, because the machine "has a peculiar self-interest in seeing a deal come together."

We know it's commonplace now, but we still can't get used to M&A reporters opining so freely and strongly on the people and subjects they cover. How can they be so sure about what deals should and shouldn't be done? Every journalist, apparently, is a business guru now. Must be the byline.

Comments

[ImmanuelGoldstein]

What makes m? accuracy of their pronouncements. Financial reporters are so confident because they can say anything they want and no one will really call them on it. Even the mosyt insulated tycoon still has real money riding on their theories.

You know what I want? I want a part of the staff at the papers who hire these types to have people who do check on their past accuracy. With a nice dial or thermometer or something indicating their past reliability. I think something like that will take the swagger out of them.

Taken as a whole this bunch has no better a proven record than a Ouija board.