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Leadership Legacies
Unicorns and Codes of Ethics
Speakers
Society tends to glorify the get-rich-quick entrepreneur–who builds a company, takes it public and then (maybe) contributes to charity.
In Leadership to Last, Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna interview iconic leaders in India who have demonstrated leadership to last. There are leaders from South Asia and other emerging markets as well to illustrate that the ideas Indian entrepreneurs speak about are echoed by their counterparts in the Global South. All these magnates–Ratan Tata, Anu Aga, Adi Godrej, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Devi Shetty and Rahul Bajaj, to name a few–have built, to general acclaim and acknowledgement, organizations that are seen as forward-looking and innovative. They subscribe to a code of ethics and contribute to the betterment of society. The authors demonstrate that this is a lot harder to achieve than unicorn status.
The authors corroborate how these stories are less about building a get-rich-quick organization and much more about triggering foundational and institutional change in society. These interviews, encapsulating the history of recent decades, eloquently lay out the opportunities and challenges of today and the future. The profiled leaders inspire awe by displaying audacity of intent, humility of demeanour and steadfastness of purpose.
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Speakers
Tarun Khanna
Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard, and the first director of the Lakshmi Mittal & Family South Asia Institute, Harvard’s university-wide endeavor straddling sciences, arts and the professions. Four books, Billions of Entrepreneurs (Harvard Business Press, 2008), Winning in Emerging Markets (Harvard Business Press, 2010), Trust (Berrett-Koehler, 2018), and Leadership to Last (Penguin, 2022) distil lessons from and for entrepreneurs across the developing world. A forthcoming co-edited collection of essays, Making Meritocracy (Oxford, 2022), explores meritocracy as an organizing principle in China and India, from antiquity to the present. His online course, Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies (edX), has been taken by three quarters of a million students in over 200 countries, and is one of the most popular open online courses of all time. He is an active founder of and investor in several ventures across emerging markets, and has been appointed to several commissions related to higher education and entrepreneurship by the Government of India.
Rishikesha T Krishnan
Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan is Director and Professor of Strategy at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB). He held the Jamuna Raghavan Chair in Entrepreneurship at IIMB from 2007 to 2010. He completed a 5-year term as Director of the Indian Institute of Management Indore in December 2018.
Prof. Krishnan was educated at IIT Kanpur, Stanford University and IIM Ahmedabad. His main areas of interest are strategy and innovation. He has been listed in the Thinkers50 India list of most influential management thinkers from India.
Apart from publications in academic journals, case studies and articles in the business press, Prof. Krishnan has written two books: 8 Steps to Innovation: Going from Jugaad to Excellence (co-authored with Vinay Dabholkar) which won the Best Book Award for 2013-14 from the Indian Society for Training & Development and From Jugaad to Systematic Innovation: The Challenge for India.
Prof. Krishnan was a member of the expert committee set up by the Government of India in 2017-18 under the chairmanship of Justice BN Srikrishna to propose a data protection framework for India. He is a member of the board of the Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) and Wheels India Ltd., and a trustee of the Foundation for Excellence India Trust.
Prof. Krishnan co-founded one start-up and was the CEO of another. He has been on the jury of the Economic Times start-up awards. He is currently on the advisory board of YourNest Investment Advisors.
