Bala Chakravarthy is Professor Emeritus of Strategy and Leadership. He held the Shell Chair in Sustainable Business Growth at IMD from 2003 to 2012. His research, teaching, and consulting interests cover three related areas: managing the global enterprise (with a focus on companies from emerging markets), strategies for sustainable business growth and their execution, and mastering leadership dilemmas.
He has published four books, several case studies, and numerous articles on these topics in both academic and practitioner-oriented journals. His book, Profit or Growth?: Why You Don’t Have to Choose, was published in 2007 and translated into German, Italian, Korean, Russian, Arabic and Norwegian.
In today’s turbulent environment, many organizations must renew themselves continuously just to stay alive. Leadership excellence in this context will be measured differently, not by how a leader delivers against a single goal but against multiple and often competing goals.
Chakravarthy is a mechanical engineer by training and worked as an executive at Tata Motors in his native India before taking his doctorate at the Harvard Business School. He has taught at the Wharton School, where he won the Anvil Award for best teacher, and at INSEAD, where he directed its corporate renewal initiative from 1993-94. He held the Edson Spencer Chair in Technological Leadership at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota from 1994-2000.
As an active top management consultant and executive education specialist, he has worked with many leading multinationals around the world on their transformation journeys and has won numerous awards throughout his career for excellence in teaching.
Chakravarthy has also served, or currently serves, on the editorial boards of Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Long Range Planning Journal, and Strategy and Leadership. He was appointed an inaugural Fellow of the International Strategic Management Society (SMS), in recognition of his contributions to the field of strategic management and served as a member of the Board of Directors of the SMS from 1999-2004.
