How did a Russian-born novelist become such an influential “thought leader” for American CEOs, entrepreneurs, and MBAs — and even Alan Greenspan? Consider the message behind Ayn Rand best sellers The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which speaks to anyone with ambition and a big ego: The gifted should do what’s in their self-interest. If you have a sharp mind, it is your moral responsibility to make yourself happy. The weak are not your problem. “I am for an absolute laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy,” Rand told CBS interviewer Mike Wallace in 1959. “If you separate the government from economics, if you do not regulate production and trade, you will have peaceful cooperation, harmony, and justice among men.”

Rand’s critics claim that the current financial crisis proves her theories unrealistic and selfish. “Her economic ideas were never really relevant or workable,” says Rick Wilson, a sociology instructor at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., which offers a class on Rand’s writings. “The time we’re living through is just another example of that.” And yet 51 years after Atlas Shrugged was published, Rand’s writing still wields considerable influence in business.

Rand’s Objectivist philosophy — which calls for facts over feelings, reason over mysticism, individual over state, and selfishness before altruism — wouldn’t have reached the masses if not for her books. Her first best seller, The Fountainhead, weaved those Objectivist beliefs into the speeches of the book’s hero, architect Howard Roark. Roark, who faces trial for dynamiting a building that he designed after his architectural plans were changed behind his back, tells the jury that he lives on his own terms, with no obligation to men except “to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.”

Drafts of Atlas Shrugged were read by the young Alan Greenspan, who belonged to Rand’s exclusive “Collective,” a group that evangelized Rand’s writings and, in Greenspan’s case, politicized them. Greenspan managed the economic boom of the 1990s on the strength of these ideas, fighting regulatory controls that threatened the free market. But with the Internet bust and corporate scandals that followed, even Greenspan relented as economists scratched their heads over what went wrong. “An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community,” Greenspan told The New York Times in 2002. But didn’t Objectivists believe greed is good?

Rand wasn’t the first to argue that government control destroys the entrepreneurial spirit. But it was Rand who went a step further to claim that men are morally obligated to fight for these freedoms.

How She Built a Following

Critics initially slammed Rand’s novels. “Remarkably silly,” “bumptious,” and “preposterous,” the National Review wrote of Atlas Shrugged. But they became best sellers anyway. Readers loved the tart-tongued Rand, with her severe bob and her dollar-sign broaches, not only for her subversive message but for her rebel persona. Business students found Rand through word of mouth, passing around dog-eared copies of Atlas, with its 1,075 pages of plot twists and turns that portray CEOs as heroes instead of villains.

Hugh Hefner and Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas found Rand fascinating. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey both cite Rand’s books as influential, though Mackey has said he doesn’t believe businesses exist solely to make a profit and selfishness is a virtue. In Silicon Valley, Rand’s ideas appeal to generations of entrepreneurs who built the computer industry and the Internet. T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, is a notorious Rand fan; Patrick W. Grady named his company Rearden Commerce after the steel magnate Hank Rearden from Atlas.

John Allison, the former CEO of banking giant BB&T, has called Atlas “the best defense of capitalism ever written.” Ironically, the bank has taken $3 billion in the recent government bailout. Still, BB&T’s charitable arm donated several million dollars to start classes devoted to Rand’s philosophy on university campuses. At Marshall University’s Lewis College of Business, which received a $1 million BB&T grant, Cal Kent teaches a course that studies Atlas alongside Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Kent says the class uses Rand to compare and contrast economic theories from around the world.

Why She Still Has Fans

In the past year, Rand’s brand of unbridled capitalism has taken a beating. Greenspan, likely Rand’s most famous follower, admitted in October 2008 to a “flaw” in free-market ideology, and Objectivists have since distanced themselves from him. “The bulk of the blame for this crisis should be on the Federal Reserve,” says Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute.

Still, sales of Atlas are stronger than ever. Following media coverage last year of the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, sales rocketed to 185,000 copies, an all-time high.

Many executives are taking refuge in Rand’s heroes today — just as some did in the wake of the Enron scandal, when suddenly all CEOs were painted as villains by an angry public. Her books offer reassurance that self-interest makes the most sense both economically and morally. Entrepreneur Joshua Zader named his two companies after Rand’s work: Atlas Web Development and Atlasphere, an online meeting and dating site for Objectivists, which is currently connecting nearly 10,000 admirers of her philosophy. Anne Omrod, CEO of Chicago-based John Galt Solutions, read Atlas in 1997 and named her company for the novel’s hero. Omrod says C-level execs, now more than ever, approach her at conferences to chat about the company name and Rand. She estimates that a third of her staff of software implementers have read the book and swears she can tell when they have: They perform better. “We don’t make it a requirement to read it,” she says. “You can definitely tell the folks who are reading it. They change their mentality to do good work.”

Another reason Rand is as popular as ever: She was right, argue her followers. They say that much of what she railed against — incompetent CEOs, federal bailouts, bloated government— has become our economic reality today. But was Rand right about the solution? If so, it would take nothing short of a John Galt-inspired strike of the entrepreneurs and the dog-eat-dog capitalists to save this economy.