Biography

Sumantra GHOSHAL

2003 ranking: 11

Sumantra Ghoshal is the Founding Dean of the new Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, a new venture jointly sponsored by Northwestern University and the London Business School. He also holds the Robert P. Bauman Chair in Strategic Leadership at the London Business School, where he is a member of the Strategy and International Management faculty. Before joining London Business School in 1994 he was Professor of Business Policy at INSEAD and a visiting professor at MIT's Sloan School.

Working with Harvard's Christopher Bartlett Ghoshal has become one of the world's most respected business thinkers through their books Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution (1988); Transnational Management (1990); Organization Theory and the Multinational Corporation (1993); and The Individualized Corporation (1997).

His most recent work focuses on the need to develop strategy which encompasses people. He has been critical of the current fad for knowledge management. "To say knowledge management hasn't delivered the goods is an exaggeration", says Professor Ghoshal. "But overall, organizations haven't reaped the benefits predicted. Many companies initially saw knowledge management as a technical task and handed it over to their IT people, who went away and created sophisticated IT systems. But it's really a social not technological issue. Where it has been effective it is because much more attention was put on the human dimension - the social, emotional and relational context."

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