Business Today Master Class With Prof. Srikant Datar, Dean of Harvard Business School

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed how we look at both the present and the future. The established, successful practices of yesterday and the requirements of tomorrow are now not aligned anymore. In today’s challenging times, the all-important question that lingers in the mind of today’s business leader is - What will it take to be relevant, to customers, employees, community, and investors, in this new era of uncertainty?

Today, business leaders from across the globe are under tremendous pressure to build trust and deliver sustained outcomes for multiple stakeholders whose interests are not always the same.

In this setting, on July 12, 2022, the BT Master Class brings to you globally renowned management guru, Prof. Srikant Datar, Dean of the Harvard Business School, to give you a deeper understanding of new trends in management and navigating uncertainty in the post-pandemic era. As someone who serves on the board of some of the world’s largest companies, Prof. Datar will draw on his vast experience to guide Indian executives on global trends in business.

The master class will focus on how business leaders can guide their management teams, employees, boards, and a wide range of external stakeholders through this period of uncertainty, and develop a strategy and culture that drives innovation, resilience & sustainability in a business.

Key Focus Areas of the Master Class

• What is top of mind for global business leaders? How to thrive in a post-pandemic reality?
• Leadership pipeline to build and lead a high-performance team in a time of crisis
• Maximising value through innovation & sustainability

The interaction will be in the form of a talk by Prof. Datar followed by a question-and-answer session with Business Today’s Executive Director Rahul Kanwal. The audience at the event will comprise some of India’s topmost corporate executives and entrepreneurs.

ABOUT BUSINESS TODAY MASTER CLASS

The Business Today Master Class is a powerful platform for the world’s leading experts from diverse domains to share insights on matters related to society, the economy, and governance. The talks comprise sharp, interactive sessions with leaders of industry and is aimed to broaden their understanding of the implications of current economic and industrial events worldwide, and help them sharpen their global strategies to achieve sustained business success.

ABOUT PROF. SRIKANT DATAR, DEAN, HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

Srikant M. Datar became the eleventh dean of Harvard Business School on 1 January 2021. During his tenure at the School, he has served as Senior Associate Dean for University Affairs (including Faculty Chair of the Harvard Innovation Lab), for Research, for Executive Education, for Faculty Development, and for Faculty Recruiting.

A graduate with distinction from the University of Bombay, Datar received gold medals upon graduation from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and the Institute of Cost and Works Accountants of India. A Chartered Accountant, he holds two masters degrees and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Datar’s research and course development have been in the areas of cost management and management control, strategy implementation, governance, and, more recently, management education, design thinking and innovative problem solving, and machine learning and artificial intelligence. He has published his work on activity-based management, quality, productivity, time-based competition, new product development, bottleneck management, incentives, and performance evaluation in journals such as The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, Contemporary Accounting Research, and Management Science. He is a co-author of the leading cost accounting textbook, Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis (Prentice-Hall) and of Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads (Harvard Business Press). He has authored more than 30 cases on topics ranging from Data Science at Target to Nippon Steel.

Datar has taught MBA and executive education classes in design thinking, innovation, big data, and strategy implementation. Before joining the HBS faculty he held appointments at both Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University, where he received the George Leland Bach Award for Excellence in the Classroom and the Distinguished Teaching Award, respectively.

Datar serves on the Board of Directors of ICF International, Novartis AG, Stryker Corporation, and T-Mobile US, and has worked with many corporations on consulting and field-based projects. He was honoured by the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) as the Public Company Director for 2020.  He is a member of the American Accounting Association and the Institute of Management Accountants. He has served on the editorial board of several journals and presented his research to academic and executive audiences in North America, South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe.