Management literature is mourning one of its gurus. Sumantra Ghoshal, Robert P. Bauman Chair in Strategic Leadership at the London Business School and founding Dean of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, passed away suddenly last week at the age of 55.
A graduate of MIT and Harvard, Sumantra Ghoshal was an influential management thinker and a prolific writer. His publications include: Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution, Transnational Management: Text, Cases And Readings, Organization Theory And The Multinational Corporation, The Individualized Corporation, The Differentiated Network, and several others. In 1995, he published a series of three groundbreaking articles in the Harvard Business Review, all co-authored with Christopher Bartlett under the titles “Changing Role of Top Management” - Beyond Strategy to Purpose (1) - Beyond Structure to Processes (2) - Beyond Systems to People(3). These articles examined the most basic task of corporate leaders - to unleash the human spirit which makes initiative, creativity and entrepreneurship possible. His most recent book, Managing Radical Change, explores the key factors that influence an organization’s ability to achieve radical improvement and surf a rapidly changing business environment.
In a forthcoming post, we'll come back to Ghoshal's contributions pertaining to the issues raised by globalization.
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