Today, Harvard President Drew Faust announced that the school has chosen Professor Nitin Nohria as the tenth Dean of Harvard Business School, effective July 1. A scholar of leadership and organizational change, Professor Nohria joined HBS in 1988 and has served the school in a number of capacities: as head of the organizational behavior unit, as senior associate dean for faculty development, and now as co-chair of the school’s leadership initiative. Professor Nohria received his bachelor of technology degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, which awarded him its distinguished alumnus medal in 2007. He received his Ph.D. in management in 1988 from MIT’s Sloan School of Management where he earned the outstanding doctoral thesis award in behavioral and policy sciences. He is co-author or co-editor of 16 books, including “What Really Works: The 4+2 Formula for Sustained Business Success,” a systematic large-scale study of management practices that truly differentiate business winners. His most recent, Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice, is a compendium dedicated to advancing research on leadership based on a colloquium he organized during HBS’s centennial celebrations.
President Faust, in her announcement, praises Professor Nohria, saying that “in his own teaching and research he exemplifies the school’s strong commitment to both academic rigor and relevance to practice, and he has a global outlook and an instinct for collaboration across traditional boundaries that promise to serve the Business School and the University well. He is someone who not only studies leadership but embodies qualities of leadership in how he engages with people and ideas, how he thinks about organizational change, and how he sees the consequential challenges facing business schools and the business world more generally. He is also someone with both a deep knowledge of HBS and its distinctive culture and a clear appetite for innovation and change in the service of sustaining HBS’s preeminence among business schools worldwide.”
