Congratulations are in order for friend of the company Marshall Goldsmith, one of the really good guys in this business, on winning the 2011 Thinkers50 Leadership Award as the World’s Most-Influential Leadership Thinker.

Now sponsored by the Harvard Business Review, The Thinkers50 is a decade-old, biannual global ranking of management thinkers that uses ten criteria to rank thinkers: originality of ideas; practicality of ideas; presentation style; written communication; loyalty of followers; business sense; international outlook; rigor of research; impact of ideas and the elusive guru factor. Goldsmith has all of those qualities in spades, ranked number seven on the overall Thinkers50 list and was certainly deserving of the award in Leadership he took home.

Business Book Readers will know Marshall from his excellent and highly influential books, most recently What Got You Here Won’t Get You There and MOJO. Friends and followers of the company might remember him from the LeaveSmarter event we held with him here in Milwaukee last year (you can find a video excerpt from that event at the end of this post).

Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Innovator’s Solution and, this year, The Innovator’s DNA won the award in Innovaton and was number one in the overall rankings.

And there are other categories and awards in the Thinkers50 as well, including the Thinkers50 Book Award, which Pankaj Ghemawat won for his new book World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It, in which he rejects “flat world” view of the global economy and offer a more nuanced, semi-globalized view.

Other Think50 2011 category winners include:

• Blue Ocean Strategy coauthors W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne in Strategy
• Vijay Govindarajan, author of Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators and The Other Side of Innovation, took the Breakthrough Idea Award
• Lucy P Marcus took home the Future Thinker Award
• Nirmalya Kumar, author of India Inside, won the Global Village Award

For a complete list of this year’s Thinkers50 and where they all rank, a lot of great video with those who made the list and everyone who made the shortlist for the awards, head on over to Thinkers50.com.