7. Sharon Oster
Dean and management professor at the Yale School of Management
Oster is the only woman on our list. Her textbook "Modern Competitive Analysis" has five stars on Amazon.com and was called "A blockbuster of a book" in the reviews. A former student, Alan Carniol, says
her Rolodex includes the name of every Yale SOM student who has attended while she's taught, and that "literally, as we were approaching graduation, she made sure every person walked out of there with a job." When their daughter Emily was a toddler, Oster and her husband, fellow Yale economist Ray Fair, recorded her talking before she would go to sleep. The analysis of those tapes was turned into a book, "Conversations from the Crib." Emily Oster is now an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
I am on her Rolodex. I've made sure of it before I left campus....