India’s IT mogul and Bangalore-based Wipro Techonologies Chairman Azim Premji and Bangladesh’s micro-credit leader and Nobel Prize winner Mohammad Yusuf are among all-time top 30 entrepreneurs identified by leading business magazine Business Week.

They find themselves in the company of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Benjamin Franklin, John D Rockefeller, Thomas Edison and Michael Dell.

The 30 selected include a Ming dynasty explorer Zheng He who lived in the 15th century. Among others are 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, Ralph Lauren, Martha Stewart, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bezos and Pierre Omidyar.

Premium on quality
The write-up about Premji speaks of his business acumen which enabled him to turn struggling business he inherited from his father at 21 into a leading IT company in India and growing player in the global market.

“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 a hands-on manager involved in day-to-day operations, even making sales calls himself,” it says. Business Week says it “picked the brains” of professors, authors and its own staffers to compile the list.

Subjective list
The criterion was simple: 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. But still it agreed that the list is subjective.

Many chosen have also created businesses that in turn encouraged others to start their own enterprises, the magazine said.