There are some who go with the flow, while there are others who try to change the world for better with their revolutionary thinking.
Here we present 25 global thinkers, including six Indians, who tried to bring change through their ideas, according to Foreign Policy magazine.
Among the businessmen, economists and tech giants, the magazine also lists Anna Hazare and Arundhati Roy among the world's top 100 global thinkers.
Let us first see which Indian economists and businessmen have made it to the list.
Azim Premji
Designation: Chairman, Wipro
World ranking: 14
It's not just because of Premji's enormous wealth that he is compared to the American technologist turned philanthropist.
Granted, the chairman of the technology-services company Wipro is India's third-richest citizen, with a net worth of $13 billion, according to Forbes.
It is Premji's unprecedented philanthropy, however, that recently has borne out the Gates comparison.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Abhijit Banerjee
Designation: Economist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
World ranking: 60
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee (born 1961) is an Indian economist.
He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Banerjee is a co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (along with economists Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan) and a Research Affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action, a New Haven, Connecticut-based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems, and a Member of the Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Deepa Narayan
Designation: Poverty researcher, India
World ranking: 79
Deepa Narayan is project director of the 15-country World Bank study titled Moving Out of Poverty: Understanding Freedom, Democracy, and Growth from the Bottom Up.
From 2002 through 2008 she served as senior adviser in the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network of the World Bank, first in the Poverty Reduction Group and subsequently in the vice-president's office within Prem.
In 2000, she led the Voices of the Poor project for the World Bank.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Kishore Mahbubani
Designation: Dean, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore
World ranking: 91
A student of philosophy and history, Kishore Mahbubani has had the good fortune of enjoying a career in government and, at the same time, in writing on public issues.
With the Singapore Foreign Service from 1971 to 2004, he had postings in Cambodia (where he served during the war in 1973-74), Malaysia, Washington, DC, and New York, where he served two stints as Singapore's Ambassador to the UN and as President of the UN Security Council in January 2001 and May 2002.
He was Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Ministry from 1993 to 1998.
Currently, he is the Dean and Professor in the Practice of Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy of the National University of Singapore.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Arvind Subramanian
Designation: Senior fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, DC
World ranking: 97
Arvind Subramanian, an Indian national, is senior fellow jointly at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Center for Global Development.
He was assistant director in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund.
During his career at the Fund, he worked on trade, development, Africa, India, and the Middle East.
He served at the Gatt (1988-92) during the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations and taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government (1999-2000) and at Johns Hopkins' School for Advanced International Studies (2008-10).
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Ben Bernanke
Designation: Chairman, Federal Reserve, United States
World ranking: 10
Ben Shalom Bernanke, born December 13, 1953, is an American economist, and the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States.
During his tenure as Chairman, he has overseen the response of the Federal Reserve to late-2000s financial crisis.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Jean-Claude Trichet
Designation: President, European Central Bank
World ranking: 10
Jean-Claude Trichet (born December 20, 1942) is a French civil servant who was the president of the European Central Bank, a position he held from 2003 to 2011.
He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Bank for International Settlements.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Zhou Xiaochuan
Designation: Governor, People's Bank of China
World ranking: 10
Zhou Xiaochuan (born January 29, 1948) is a Chinese economist, banker, reformist and bureaucrat.
As governor of the People's Bank of China since December 2002, he has been in charge of the monetary policy of the People's Republic of China.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Bill and Melinda Gates
Designation: Co-chairs, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, United States
World ranking: 13
There's philanthropy, and then there's Gates philanthropy.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which was founded in 1994 and has grown exponentially in resources and ambition since the software mogul's 2008 retirement from Microsoft to pursue saving the world full time, sits on an endowment of $36.3 billion.
Already, the Gates Foundation has handed out more than $25 billion, well in excess of the GDP of Bahrain, in grants for everything from charter schools to antimalarial mosquito netting to microfinance to research into diseases - say, visceral leishmaniasis - that few Americans have even heard of.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Christine Lagarde
Designation: Managing Director, International Monetary Fund, United States
World ranking: 15
Christine Madeleine Odette Lagarde (born 1 January 1956) is a French lawyer and the managing director of the International Monetary Fund since July 5, 2011.
Previously, she held various ministerial posts in the French government: she was Minister of Economic Affairs, Finances and Industry and before that Minister of Agriculture and Fishing and Minister of Trade in the government of Dominique de Villepin.
Lagarde was the first woman ever to become minister of Economic Affairs of a G8 economy, and is the first woman to ever head the IMF.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Jack Dorsey
Designation: Executive Chairman, Twitter, United States
World ranking: 17
Jack Dorsey (born November 19, 1976) is an American software architect and businessperson widely known as the creator of Twitter and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company.
In 2008, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Mark Zuckerberg
Designation: CEO, Facebook, United States
World ranking: 17
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur.
He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Carmen Reinhart
Designation: Economist, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, DC
World ranking: 25
Carmen M Reinhart (born October 7, 1955) is the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Previously, she was Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland.
She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Founding Contributor of VoxEU, and a member of Council on Foreign Relations.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Kenneth Rogoff
Designation: Economist, Harvard University, United States
World ranking: 25
Kenneth Saul 'Ken' Rogoff (born March 22, 1953) is currently the Thomas D Cabot Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics at Harvard University.
He is also a chess Grandmaster.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
David Beers
Designation: Head, sovereign ratings, Standard and Poor's, United kingdom
World ranking: 26
Given that few people have ever heard of him -- he didn't even have his own Wikipedia page until just a few months ago -- David Beers has a remarkable ability to make the world's most powerful governments and corporations hang on his every word.
In August, the division of Standard & Poor's he heads sent shock waves through the global economy by downgrading the United States' sovereign-credit rating from AAA to AA+.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Nouriel Roubini
Designation: Economist, New York University
World ranking: 30
Rarely has someone done so well predicting that the world will go so wrong. Nouriel Roubini rose to prominence for forecasting that the 2008 housing crisis would lead to a global economic meltdown, and he has been peddling a message of doom and gloom ever since.
Unfortunately for all of us, he's been right.
Since the crisis hit, Roubini has consistently pushed back against the conventional wisdom that the worst is over, notably warning in 2008 that banks' losses would be measured in the trillions of dollars, when the optimists were still predicting that the crisis was limited to a narrow subsection of the financial sector.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Paul Krugman
Designation: Economist, Princeton University
World ranking: 32
For American liberals, Paul Krugman's twice-a-week New York Times column has become a life raft in a sea of public-policy discourse that has turned distinctly choppy.
An early critic from the left of President Barack Obama's economic policy - in 2009 he argued loudly that the $787 billion stimulus package proposed by the White House was too small - the Nobel Prize-winning economist-cum-pundit's outrage has only grown in 2011.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Joseph Stiglitz
Designation: Economist, Columbia University, United States
World ranking: 33
With the global financial contagion still spreading, the insights of this Nobel Prize-winning economist and prominent critic of globalization have been more in demand than ever.
His 2010 book, Freefall, was a well-deserved "I-told-you-so", and he has continued to point fingers at growing inequality and the global economic establishment's slavish devotion to free market ideology for helping cause the crash.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Robert Zoellick
Designation: President, World Bank
World ranking: 41
Robert Bruce Zoellick (born July 25, 1953) is the 11th President of the World Bank, a position he has held since July 1, 2007.
He was previously a managing director of Goldman Sachs, United States Deputy Secretary of State (resigning on July 7, 2006) and US Trade Representative, from February 7, 2001, until February 22, 2005.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Christina Romer
Designation: Economist, University of California - Berkeley, California
World ranking: 46
In December 2008, Christina Romer, newly appointed to head Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, delivered what her colleague and successor, Austan Goolsbee, later speculated may have been "the worst briefing any president-elect has ever had" on the extent of the damage wrought by the bursting US housing bubble.
Romer recommended a $1.2 trillion stimulus, watered down to $787 billion a few months later.
Since then, and particularly since leaving the White House last year, Romer, an academic expert on the Great Depression whose work focused on the role of monetary policy in precipitating the crash, has sounded an increasingly urgent alarm about America's jobs crisis.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Mohamed El-Erian
Designation: CEO, Primco, United States
World ranking: 54
The world has finally caught up with Mohamed El-Erian. For nearly half a decade, the CEO of the world's largest bond fund has guided his investments and widely quoted public writings by the same unhappy theory: Things are going to get worse before they get better.
The global economy isn't just weathering a tough spell, El-Erian argues - it's undergoing fundamental structural changes on the road to a "new normal", and the longer we put off dealing with them the more painful they will be.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Martin Wolf
Designation: Columnist, Financial Times, United Kingdom
World ranking: 55
A former World Bank economist, Martin Wolf has called his job as a financial journalist an accident.
But the nuanced, prescription-heavy columns that he has penned for the Financial Times since 1996 - complete with dense, data-rich charts on everything from US bond yields to the latest Chinese stats - have earned him a devoted following among top economists, politicians, and financiers.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Paul Collier
Designation: Economist, Oxford University, United Kingdom
World ranking: 56
Best known for identifying the world's poorest 'bottom billion' in his 2007 book of the same name, Paul Collier has long insisted that bad governance is most to blame for global poverty and that the West should stop cozying up to dictators who enable the worst abuses.
His 2009 book, Wars, Guns, and Votes, controversially called on Western countries to condone foreign military coups in response to sham elections, while suppressing rebellions against politicians elected fairly.
Thus, according to Collier, the international community could at least delegitimize - and perhaps even help topple - the world's most corrupt and anti-democratic leaders.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Mikko Hypponen
Designation: Chief Research Officer, F-Secure, Finland
World ranking: 61
Mikko Hypponen spends his days waist-deep in worms and viruses - of the virtual kind.
A leading expert on cybersecurity, he has played a key role in helping us understand - and then stop - some of the dangerous menaces of the digital age.
There were the worms Sobig.F, which Hypponen and his team dismantled in 2003, and Sasser, which they spotted in 2004; more recently, he has monitored hacking at Sony, as well as security threats to mobile devices.
Hypponen's most high-profile case by far, however, is Stuxnet (and Duqu, its recent clone), and here his investigations shed much-needed light on the complex new world of cyberwar, where the bad guys and good guys alike - from shadowy computer hacks to major world powers - are now fighting.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Barry Eichengreen
Designation: Economist, University of California - Berkeley, California
World ranking: 66
This Berkeley professor's work explaining the fall of the dollar as a global currency - and why it might not matter - has made him a "go-to economist on the continuing global financial crisis," according to Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist David Leonhardt.
Barry Eichengreen's new book, Exorbitant Privilege, is an eye-opening look at the history and future of global currency.
The bad news, for Americans at least, is that the dollar will soon lose its status as the world's dominant reserve currency, gradually sharing the role with the euro and the renminbi.
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Six Indians among world's top thinkers
Lester Brown
Designation: President, Earth Policy Institute, United States
World ranking: 78
In January, as Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was fleeing a mass uprising in Tunisia and the first demonstrators were crowding into Cairo's Tahrir Square, global food prices reached peaks not seen in two decades of UN records.
Whether the food riots that exploded in countries from Algeria to Yemen that month were a cause or simply a confounding factor in the Arab Spring, to Lester Brown the lesson is clear: "Get ready, farmers and foreign ministers alike," he wrote, "for a new era in which world food scarcity increasingly shapes global politics."
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