Summer 2004, Vol. 45, No. 4, p. 2

When acclaimed management thinker Sumantra Ghoshal died unexpectedly in March, the loss was felt immediately and emphatically around the world. As Robert P. Bauman Professor of Strategic Leadership at London Business School, a fellow at the Advanced Institute of Management Research, a fellow at the Academy of International Business and previously a professor at the INSEAD business school in France, Professor Ghoshal was well known and highly regarded worldwide as a teacher, consultant, public speaker and author. For all who knew him or met him, it will be his agile and versatile mind, his graceful, clearly expressed insights and his worldview that tended toward the counterintuitive, the contrarian and the iconoclastic that will be most remembered and most missed.

"His passing is an enormous loss to the field because his first instinct with any assertion or piece of conventional wisdom was to challenge it," remembers Professor Eleanor Westney, who supervised Professor Ghoshal's doctoral dissertation at MIT Sloan School of Management and became a friend and co-author. "The more widely accepted the wisdom, the more aggressively he went after it. He cared passionately about generating useful knowledge."

"He had little interest in the mundane, the predictable or the obvious," recalls co-author Lynda Gratton, a professor at the London Business School. "He wanted to surprise, to intrigue, to question." Another LBS colleague, Professor Julian Birkinshaw, concurs: "He had a razor-sharp mind; he was a charismatic and inspiring speaker; and he was unstinting in his drive for excellence in management education and research."

Despite the global recognition and adulation he received, Professor Ghoshal frequently returned to his native India to teach. He was one of the prime movers behind the establishment of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. "Professor Ghoshal was intense in everything he did," adds Sloan Deputy Dean Don Lessard. "He genuinely cared about deepening the understanding of management and caused those he interacted with to reach harder."

Sumantra Ghoshal was a big-picture thinker and, at his core, a humanist. He saw how the individual, so often seemingly lost in the organization's hierarchy, is the true catalyst for unleashing its energy. He wrote numerous thought-provoking articles, many in MIT Sloan Management Review (whose editorial advisory board he served on for four years), explaining how leading companies find ways to inspire managers to deep, action-oriented commitment, or how they energize employees to achieve sustainable success. Among his best-known books is the seminal work Managing Across Borders (1989), written with Harvard Business School Professor Christopher A. Bartlett, which posited a transnational model to help organizations maintain a balance between international scope and local responsiveness. The same two authors produced The Individualized Corporation in 1997, which was one of the first books to suggest that managers were giving short shrift to the development of that most valuable of assets, human capital. Recent initiatives included his work with London Business School colleague Peter Moran to develop a new theory of the firm, one that would help companies achieve organizational goals by giving employees encouragement to think creatively. Professor Ghoshal always fervently believed this to be a far more effective avenue to competitive advantage than the hidebound tenets of command and control.

Professor Ghoshal's most recent SMR articles include this year's Beckhard Prize winner, "Integrating the Enterprise," with Lynda Gratton, published in fall 2002, and two pieces authored with Heike Bruch: "Going Beyond Motivation to the Power of Volition" (spring 2003) and "Unleashing Organizational Energy" (fall 2003).

Unlike many, Sumantra Ghoshal was equally at home in the worlds of theory and practice. "He could attend an academic seminar in the morning [on] an obscure line of theory and then in the afternoon hold an audience of senior executives spellbound with his insights into their problems," recalls Professor Birkinshaw. Lynda Gratton suggests that the essence of Professor Ghoshal's perspective could be seen in his case-study research methods. He approached an interview with an executive no differently than a discussion with "a competent and trusted coresearcher from a related but different discipline, attempting to arrive at a shared interpretation of data." In the final analysis, says Professor Gratton, the data represented "not a concrete object or experience, but a human conception."

Not only was Professor Ghoshal comfortable with both theory and practice, but, what is even more rare, he continually saw and demonstrated the vibrant, inextricable, human connection between the two. In that sense, as well as in many others, Sumantra Ghoshal embodied an ideal to be emulated by all who pursue not only management wisdom but enlightenment of any kind.

 

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