Gautam Mukunda
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Gautam Mukunda is an Assistant Professor in the Organizational Behavior Unit of Harvard Business School. Before joining the business school he was the National Science Foundation Synthetic Biology ERC Postdoctoral Fellow resident at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies. He received his PhD from MIT in Political Science and an A.B. in Government from Harvard, magna cum laude. His research focuses on leadership, international relations, and the social and political implications of technological change. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and MIT's Security Studies Program and Program on Emerging Technologies.
Before graduate school he was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he focused on the pharmaceutical sector. He is Founding Managing Director of The Two Rivers Group, a strategy consulting firm focusing on applying insights from academia to private and public sector problems. He is a member of the Board of Directors and Chair of the Mentorship Committee of The Upakar Foundation, a national non-profit devoted to providing college scholarships to underprivileged students of South Asian descent. He is a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow, an NSF IGERT Fellow, and a Next Generation Fellow of The American Assembly. He has published articles on leadership, military innovation, network-centric warfare, and the security and economic implications of synthetic biology in Security Studies, Parameters, Politics and the Life Sciences, Systems and Synthetic Biology, and the Washington Post. His first book, "Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter," was published in September 2012 by Harvard Business Review Press.
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Book
| 2012
Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter
Gautam Mukunda
Will your next leader be insignificant—or indispensable? The importance of leadership and the impact of individual leaders has long been the subject of debate. Are they made by history, or do they make it? In Indispensable, Harvard Business School professor Gautam Mukunda offers an enticingly fresh look at how and when individual leaders really can make a difference. By identifying and analyzing the hidden patterns of their careers, and by exploring the systems that place these leaders in positions of power, Indispensable sheds new light on how we may be able to identify the best leaders and what lessons we can learn, from both the process and the result. Profiling a mix of historic and modern figures—from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Winston Churchill and Judah Folkman—and telling the stories of how they came to power and how they made the most important decisions of their lives, Indispensable reveals how, when, and where a single individual in the right place at the right time can save or destroy the organization they lead, and even change the course of history. Indispensable will also help you understand this new model so you can use it in your own life—whether you're a citizen casting a ballot, an executive choosing your next CEO, or a leader trying to make your mark.
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Case
| HBS Case Collection
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2012
Gerry Pasciucco at AIG Financial Products (A)
Gautam Mukunda and Thomas J. DeLong
Gerry Pasciucco was appointed to lead American International Group's Financial Products (AIGFP) group after the government bailout of AIG in 2008 and charged with the task of shutting down the division while minimizing the government's losses. AIGFP's failed trades had threatened to bring down the entire company, and the government had responded by loaning AIG $182 billion in exchange for 79.9% of the company, because it feared that AIG's failure could trigger the collapse of the entire global financial system. Several months into his tenure, the division paid large retention bonuses to all of its professionals according to a contract negotiated before he joined AIGFP. These bonuses were seen by the public as going to the very people whose mistakes resulted in the need for a bailout in the first place and resulted in an unprecedented storm of public outrage, culminating in a Congressional hearing in which AIG's CEO, Ed Liddy, was repeatedly attacked for making the bonus payments. Liddy responded by asking people who had received the largest payments to return the money to the company. Now Pasciucco has to decide how to lead his team through this crisis while grappling with the larger issues of the justice of the retention payments.
Keywords: Corporate Accountability;
Ethics;
Crisis Management;
Financial Crisis;
Management Teams;
Business and Government Relations;
Financial Services Industry;
United States;
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