Indian professor named Harvard B-school Dean

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In his 2003 book ‘What Actually Operates: The 4+2 Formula For Sustained Business
Success’, Nitin Nohria explores six company practices that winning corporates juggle to stay ahead. The juggling metaphor isn’t incidental. Like everything else, the newly-designated dean of Harvard Business College (HBS) does, it’s well thought out. As he explains, juggling three balls needs loads of practice and keeping four from the air is actually tough. People who can take on six balls are the masters and you will discover incredibly few such jugglers inside world.

I won’t go into the six practices he lists as crucial to company success — the book is simply accessible for people who might wish to read it — but Mr Nohria himself has constantly managed to keep numerous balls in the air in his road to stardom in academia. For just one, he is really a wonderful teacher. Intense and passionate about his subject, he keeps students totally engaged within the classroom, orchestrating case studies discussions with a dramatic flair that is mesmerising.

Secondly, the IIT-Bombay and Sloan College of Enterprise alumnus is a great researcher. What Really Operates, for example, was based on a study of 160 firms and 200 management strategies over a period of ten many years, a massive analysis project by any standards, created and executed by him, in league with colleagues William Joyce and Bruce Roberson.

Thirdly, he has excellent inter-personnel abilities. Outside of the classroom, and even within it, he’s a terrific conversationalist. When I met him eight years ago, for that very first time, inside Nohria apartment on Napean Sea Road (his father Kewal Nohria was for long the chairman of Crompton Greaves), the topic he wanted to be interviewed on was ‘conversations, the importance of.’ A single of his closest friends in academia was the late Sumantra Ghoshal of London Business School, and I recall Mr Nohria saying that some of his greatest ideas came out of conversations with his friend.

Fourth, he operates perfectly in a team. From the early 2000s, along with Krishna Palepu and Das Narayandas, he pioneered Harvard’s foray into executive education (and investigation) in India, regularly conducting programmes for the Tata management and the All India Management Association at the Tata Management Training Centre in Pune. With their varied expertise — Mr Palepu in finance, Mr Narayandas in marketing and Mr Nohria in organisational behaviour — the three Harvard professors then made for a powerful troika.

There are few who can juggle a fifth, but Mr Nohria has a single additional ball inside the air as he starts his term as dean of HBS. He’s an expert on leadership. As author of books like ‘The Arc Of Ambition: Defining the Leadership Journey’ and ‘Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices’, he knows the theory. He’s also the author of ‘Paths To Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business enterprise Leadership’, which ought to be relevant to him as the quite initial dean of Indian origin at HBS.