Ranjay Gulati is the Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration and the former Unit Head of the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. He is an expert on leadership, strategy, and organizational issues in firms. His recent work explores leadership and strategic challenges for building high growth organizations in turbulent markets. Some of his prior work has focused on the enablers and implications of within-firm and inter-firm collaboration. He has looked at both when and how firms should leverage greater connectivity within and across their boundaries to enhance performance.
Professor Gulati is the former Chair of Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. He has directed several executive education programs on such topics as Building and Leading Customer Centric Organizations, Leadership in Turbulent Markets, Managing Strategic Alliances, and Sustaining Competitive Advantage. He is also active in custom executive education. He has received a number of awards for his teaching including the Best Professor Award for his teaching in the MBA and executive MBA programs at the Kellogg School where he was on the faculty prior to coming to Harvard.
His most recent book, Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High Performance Companies (Harper Collins, 2022) offer a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms get purpose right. It was picked to be among the best business books of 2022 by Forbes, Thinkers 50, and the Next Big Idea Club. It also received a bronze medal from the Axiom business books awards. Based on extensive field research, he shows how deep purpose companies energize their enterprise by inspiring employees and fostering greater loyalty and trust with customers and partners. Purpose is also a compass with which these firms navigate the inevitable tradeoffs across stakeholders more deliberately and effectively and balance their short- and long-term goals.
His previous book, Principles of Management (Cengage, 2013), is a primer on the fundamentals of management that provides a new overview of the field using contemporary examples and cases. In his book, Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Organization (Harvard Business Press, 2009), which was a finalist for the George Terry Best Book in Management Award, Professor Gulati explores how "resilient" companies—those that prosper both in good times and bad—drive growth and increase profitability by immersing themselves in the lives of their customers. Based on more than a decade of research in a range of industries including manufacturing, retail, professional services, media, information technology, and healthcare, the book uncovers the path to resilience by showing companies how to break down internal barriers that impede action, build bridges across divisions, and create a network of collaborators. His previous book, Managing Network Resources: Alliances, Affiliations, and other Relational Assets (Oxford University Press, 2007), examines the implications of firms’ growing portfolio of inter-firm connections. He demonstrates how firms increasingly are scaling back what they consider to be their core activities, and at the same time expanding their array of offerings to customers by entering into a web of collaborations. He has also co-edited a book on leading sustainable change that looks at how organizations overcome internal barriers to change in embracing sustainability programs and also co-edited two books that focus on the dynamics of competition in emerging technology-intensive industries.
Professor Gulati is the past-President of the Business Policy and Strategy Division at the Academy of Management and an elected fellow of the Strategic Management Society. He was ranked as one of the top ten most cited scholars in Economics and Business over a decade by ISI-Incite. The Economist, Financial Times, and the Economist Intelligence Unit have listed him as among the top handful of business school scholars whose work is most relevant to management practice. He has been a Harvard MacArthur Fellow and a Sloan Foundation Fellow. His research has been published in leading journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, American Journal of Sociology, Strategic Management Journal, Sloan Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, and Organization Science. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, strategy+business, and the Financial Times. Professor Gulati has been on the editorial board of several leading journals and was a co-editor of a special issue of the Strategic Management Journal on Alliances and Strategic Networks in 2000 and another special issue on Organizational Architecture that appeared in 2012. He also guest-edited a special issue of the Academy of Management Journal on Relational Pluralism in 2014.
Professor Gulati advises and speaks to corporations large and small around the globe. Some of his representative speaking and consulting clients include: Abbott Laboratories, Aetna, Allergan, American Tower, Bank of America, Bank of China, Baxter, Berkshire Partners, Boston Scientific, Caterpillar, Clifford Chance, Credit Suisse, Ford, Future Brands, GE, General Mills, Henkel, Hitachi, Honda, Hospira, IBM, Levi Strauss, LaFarge, Lockheed Martin, McGraw-Hill, Merck, Metlife, Microsoft, Nedbank, Novartis, Ochsner, Qualcomm, Rockwell Collins, Sanofi Aventis, SAP, Seyfarth Shaw, St Jude, Sutter Health, Target, Temasek, Unilever, and White and Case. He has served on the advisory boards of several companies and has appeared as an expert witness in business litigations.
He has been a frequent guest on CNBC as well as a panelist on several of their series on topics that include: the Business of Innovation, Collaboration, and Leadership Vision. Professor Gulati holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, a Master's Degree in Management from M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, and two Bachelor's Degrees, in Computer Science and Economics, from Washington State University and St. Stephens College, New Delhi, respectively. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.
