Sumantra Ghoshal, the guru who put people at the heart of management, died earlier this month,

aged 55.
Ghoshal, professor of strategy and international management at London Business School, was
best known for his work with Christopher Bartlett, of Harvard Business School. Their book about
strategy in global corporations, Managing across Borders, propelled the pair to fame in 1989.
This was followed by a series of award-winning books and articles stressing the importance of
individuals knowledge and expertise in modern organisations.
Delegates at the CIPDs annual conferences in Harrogate, where Ghoshal spoke several times
(and was due to speak this year), will recall his message that business leaders needed to focus
on purposes, processes and people rather than strategies, structures and systems. This was
crystallised in Bartlett and Ghoshals 1998 book, The Individualized Corporation.
The last article he wrote for PM (Viewpoint, 12 February 2004), as a fellow of the Advanced
Institute of Management Research, argued that management should be based on individuals
natural altruism rather than their self-interest.
Born in Calcutta, Ghoshal worked for Indian Oil before moving to Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, then Harvard. He joined Frances Insead business school in 1985 and LBS in 1994.
Full obituary (PM online)
By Julian Birkinshaw, chair of strategic and international management at London Business
School.
Sumantra Ghoshal, professor of strategic and international management at London Business
School (LBS), was one of the most brilliant and influential management thinkers of his
generation. He had a razor-sharp and creative mind; he was a charismatic and inspiring speaker;
and he was unstinting in his drive for excellence in management education and research. He
died on 3 March, aged 55, after a short illness.
Ghoshal was born in Calcutta and began his career with Indian Oil. He moved to the US in 1981
to study for a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and somehow was
able to simultaneously enrol in the parallel program at Harvard Business School. He graduated in
1986 with two doctorates, one from each institution, and took up a position as assistant professor
at Insead, the leading European business school in Fontainebleau, France.
Working with Chris Bartlett at Harvard, in 1989 Ghoshal published Managing Across Borders, the
highly influential book that caught the globalisation wave perfectly. Many companies had already
built global operations but were struggling with how to turn their diversity and complexity to their
advantage. Managing Across Borders offered executives a clear way of thinking through the
sources of advantage from operating globally. It proposed a new organisation model - the
transnational - that balanced the demands of global scope and local responsiveness.
Managing Across Borders pushed Ghoshal into the premier league of management thinkers.
Alongside his academic work he became widely known as a consultant to multinationals. His
breadth of knowledge, incisive thinking and ready wit made him a popular figure on the
conference circuit.
Ghoshal and Bartlett continued to work together, publishing a stream of articles in Harvard
Business Review and a best-selling textbook, Transnational Management. In 1997 they came out
with The Individualized Corporation, the long-awaited sequel to Managing Across Borders.
The Individualized Corporation argued for nothing less than a re-thinking of the fundamental
principles of management. Large firms emerged in an industrial era where capital was the scarce
resource, and were structured accordingly. Today, capital is plentiful and human talent is scarce:
new structures and processes, the book argued, should reflect this.

In 1994 Ghoshal moved to LBS to take up the Robert P Bauman chair of strategic leadership.
While continuing to work with Bartlett, he developed a number of other collaborative projects.
The first, with LBS colleague Peter Moran, was a deep analysis and critique of the theory of the
firm. The problem, Ghoshal argued, was that management theory had induced companies to
build control systems that assumed the worst of human behaviour. Instead, he insisted, it should
be possible to develop theories that built on an individuals creativity, enthusiasm and passion for
collaboration. These would allow companies to fulfil their higher-order interests and become a
force for good in the world.
Ghoshals work with Lynda Gratton picked up on many of the same themes. They wrote a
number of papers together, most recently Integrating the Enterprise (Sloan Management Review,
2002) in which they explored the role of leadership in building social and intellectual capital
across an organisation.
The third major collaboration was with Heike Bruch, a professor at St Gallen University,
Switzerland. Their joint work focused on the simple concept of action taking - the idea that
strategy and organisation mean nothing unless they are translated into focused and committed
action on the part of the individual employee. Their book, A Bias for Action: How Effective
Managers Harness their Willpower to Achieve Results, is due out in May.
Ghoshal was a highly unusual academic: unlike most of his peers, he could engage with both
theory and practice. He would attend an academic seminar in the morning and take the
presenter to task for failing to comprehend an obscure line of theory. In the afternoon he would
hold an audience of senior executives spellbound with his insights into the problems they faced.
Among his colleagues and friends - numbering into the thousands - Ghoshal was a source of
inspiration. His door was always open and one always left a meeting with him stimulated and
excited by his ideas. Ghoshal was also an idealist. He had no time for bureaucracy and rules: his
frequent arguments with school administrators rested on his desire to do what was right, rather
than what was easy.
Above all, Ghoshal was a contrarian. As Eleanor Westney, a long-time colleague at the MIT,
observed: His first instinct with any assertion of piece of conventional wisdom was to challenge
it. And the more widely accepted the wisdom, the more aggressively he went after it. It was this
contrarian spirit that made Ghoshal so influential in the field of management, and made him such
a sought-after speaker.
In the months before he died, Ghoshals energy and enthusiasm had, if anything, increased. He
was working on a new book, A Good Theory of Management, with Moran, and a series of new
articles with Gratton. He had become deeply involved in the Advanced Institute of Management
Research, where he was one of 17 fellows. And he continued to manage a range of MBA and
executive programs for LBS. He leaves an enormous hole in LBS and in the field of management
research. He will be deeply missed by his family and friends, as well as by the many thousands
of people with whom he came in contact with during his career.
Ghoshal is survived by his wife Sushmita, his two sons, Ananda and Siddhartha, and his parents
and brothers in Bangalore.
Selected references
BOOKS
C A Bartlett and S Ghoshal, Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution, Harvard
Business School press, Boston, 1989.
S Ghoshal and D E Westney (Eds), Organizing Theory and the Multinational Corporation,
MacMillan, London, and St. Martin's Press, New York, 1993. Japanese translation published in
1998.
N Nohria and S Ghoshal, The Differentiated Network: Organizing Multinational Coporations for

Value Creation, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1997.

S Ghoshal and C A Bartlett, The Individualized Corporation, published by Harper-Collins in the
United States in 1997.
S Ghoshal, C A Bartlett and G Piramal, Managing Radical Change: What Indian Companies
Must Do to Become World Class, Penguin Books, New Delhi, October, 2000.
S Ghoshal and H Bruch. A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness their Willpower to
Achieve Results. Harvard Business School Press. 2004.
ARTICLES
C A Bartlett and S Ghoshal, Changing the Role of Top Management: Beyond Strategy to
Purpose, Harvard Business Review November-December, 1994.
S Ghoshal and C A Bartlett, "Changing the Role of Top Management: Beyond Structure to
Process", Harvard Business Review, January-February, 1995.
S Ghoshal and P Moran, "Bad for Practice: A Critique of the Transaction Cost Theory",
Academy of Management Review, January, 1996.
C A Bartlett and S Ghoshal, Going Global, Harvard Business Review, March-April, 2000
C A Bartlett and S Ghoshal, Building Competitive Advantage Through People, Sloan
Management Review, winter, 2002.
S Ghoshal and H Bruch. Reclaim your Job, Harvard Business Review, 82 (3;): 41, 2004
H Bruch and S Ghoshal. Unleashing Organisational Energy, Sloan Management Review.
45(1): 45, 2003
S. Ghoshal and L Gratton. Integrating the Enterprise, Sloan Management Review, 44(1): 31,
2002.
L Gratton and S Ghoshal, Managing Personal Human Capital: New Ethos for the volunteer
employee, European Management Journal, 21(1): 1, 2003.