Prof. Sumantra Ghosal dead
Founding Dean of ISB

OBITUARY
September, 26, 1948 – March, 4, 2004

Prof. Sumantra Ghosal -Management Guru, Faculty, Author, Humanitarian


Born in India, educated in the USA, worked the world-over, though predominantly in Europe, Prof. Sumantra Ghoshal was a management thinker, great teacher, prolific author, and much sought-after consultant in international management .

Referred to by The Economist as the world's leading EuroGuru, he had published 11 books, over 70 articles and several award winning case studies. His research and teaching focused on strategic, organisational and managerial issues confronting large global companies.

One of the Founding Fathers of the Indian School of Business, he was serving as a Robert P Bauman Chair in Strategic Leadership at the London Business School. He was also serving as a Professor of International Management at the LBS and was as a member of The Committee of Overseers of the Harvard Business School. He had also variously taught at INSEAD, France, and at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Ever so passionately on his belief of creating world-class institutions in India, he was instrumental in establishing the School. He pushed himself in redefining limits, and gave the ISB its dream start by aiding efforts in getting a great founding batch. Prof Ghoshal was significantly attached with the ISB in several capacities – founding father, faculty for Post Graduation Programmes and Executive Education Programmes, helping the School get Corporate patronage and support, besides being increasingly accepted as a preferred location for research. It was his vision to see the ISB as a globally leading B-school, on par with the very top Schools in the world.



Prof. Ghoshal turned conventional management gurudom on its head, arguing for a kinder, more compassionate corporate culture that liberated the individual worker, re-invented the way organisations work and focussed on the individual as entrepreneur, the basic building block of any company.

Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution, a book he co-authored with Christopher Bartlett, has been listed in the Financial Times as one of the 50 most influential management books and has been translated into nine languages.

The Differentiated Network: Organizing the Multinational Corporation for Value Creation, a book he co-authored with Nitin Nohria, won the George Terry Book Award in 1997.

The Individualized Corporation, co-authored with Christopher Bartlett, won the Igor Ansoff Award in 1997, and has been translated into seven languages.

His last book, Managing Radical Change, won the Management Book of the Year award in India.

He had doctoral degrees from both the MIT School of Management and the Harvard Business School, and served on the Editorial Boards of several academic journals. He had also been nominated to the Fellowships at the Academy of Management, the Academy of International Business and the World Economic Forum.

Ghoshal’s death early on Wednesday came at the end of an 11-day critically ill period at the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead in London. As the news of his death spread throughout the Global business and management community, reaction ranged from abiding grief to a sense of loss that he died relatively young.

The man who had always wished for Indian companies to become globally competitive, put forth the '525 rule' – meaning that 25 per cent of a company's sales revenue should accrue from products launched during the last five years. He was recognised for his research and teaching on strategic, organisational and managerial issues confronting global companies.

He is survived by his wife and two children.