Harvard Business School will have an Indian born economist as its Dean from January 2021. It is a proud moment for every Indian as it is one of the biggest achievements by an individual in professional business school. Dr Srikant Datar, an Indian American economist and the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School in October 2020, was named the eleventh Dean of Harvard Business School.
He is scheduled to take charge on January 1, 2021. His students cite Datar as a dedicated and innovative teacher. The Distinguished Teaching Award at Stanford University was given to him for his teaching techniques in class. He teaches MBA and executive education classes in design thinking, innovation, big data, and strategy implementation. A graduate with distinction from the University of Bombay, he 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 also received the George Leland Bach Award for Excellence in the Classroom at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a co-author of the leading cost accounting textbook, Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis published by Prentice-Hall, and of Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads published by Harvard Business Press.
Selected by Thinkers50 India as one of 50 Indian Management Thinkers who had an impact on the theory and practice of management in 2015, Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads was selected by Strategy Business as one of the Best Business Books of 2010. Datar has several research and course development interests. His initial areas of research interest were in cost management and management control, strategy implementation and governance. Over the last few years, his areas of Interest are management education, design thinking and innovative problem solving, and machine learning and artificial intelligence.
He has published his research on activity-based management, quality, productivity, time-based competition, new product development, bottleneck management , incentives a n d performance evaluation in several prestigious journals, including The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, Contemporary Accounting Research, and Management Science. Datar has also developed two new courses on Developing Mindsets for Innovative Problem Solving and Managing with Data Science. He has served on the editorial board of several journals and presented his research to academic and executives audiences in North America, South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe.
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 fieldbased projects. He is a member of the American Accounting Association and the Institute of Management Accountants. His areas of Interest include balanced scorecard, corporate governance, innovation, performance management, strategy implementation.
