This year's top teachers have withstood the tests of time, taught through bear and bull markets, and have consistently imparted life-changing lessons to MBA students year after year.

By Andrea Carter

University of Michigan's Dana Muir

(Poets&Quants) -- A great teacher, it has been said, is like a candle. It consumes itself to light the way for others.

That's an apt description for the 50 business school professors chosen by Poets&Quants as the world's best. Most of these extraordinary teachers, chosen by their schools and their students, are longtime legends in the academic community.

They've withstood the tests of time, taught through bear and bull markets, and have consistently imparted life-changing lessons to MBA students year after year; in some cases, decade after decade. And they are not merely great teachers -- they are great faculty members, masters in both the classroom and in cutting edge research.

This year's list includes famous superstar professors, such as Harvard's Clayton Christensen, Wharton's Jeremy Siegel, and Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer, as well as faculty little known outside their schools or fields of study, such as operations maven Michael Trick at Carnegie Mellon or finance expert Dana Muir at Michigan's Ross School of Business. Some 12 of the 50 are women. Nine are Indian, including Dartmouth's Vijay Govindarajan, the innovation guru at the Tuck School, and NYU's Aswath Damodaran, the self-effacing master of finance at the Stern School.

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They have brought novel approaches to both research and teaching. Peter Ubel, who teaches health care management at Duke University's Fuqua School, once recruited students to ride up and down in hospital elevators to listen in on conversations. They overheard hospital employees making completely inappropriate remarks, and media all over the world covered the study. Babson College's Candida Brush is obsessed with golf, and frequently uses the game as a metaphor for teaching business and entrepreneurship. "Things like focus, follow through, and flexibility are all skills that apply to the golf course, the classroom, and the office," she says.

If they hadn't become teachers, their alternatives run the gamut. Myles Shaver, a strategy professor at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School, imagines he might have been the host of "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives." Sharon Oster, the former dean of Yale's School of Management, would ideally be a comedienne. Berkeley's Atif Mian would trade his expertise in finance to become a molecular biologist. And then, there are a few with a clear sports bent: Peter Morici, an economics professor at the University of Maryland's Smith School, dreams of being the owner of the New York Giants. NYU's Aswath Damodaran fancies himself on the New York Yankees' roster as Derek Jeter's successor. More