Lakshmi Balachandra

Lakshmi Balachandra teaches Improvisational Leadership: In the Moment Leadership Skills a course she designed that incorporates improvisational skills for leadership development. As a research fellow at the Program on Negotiation, she teaches a similar course that incorporates improvisation for negotiation at Harvard Business School for advanced negotiation students. She has led research on improvisation and its connections to leadership and negotiation with a series of articles in Negotiation and The Negotiation Journal. She has been a consultant on improvisation and/or negotiation development for executives at such firms as Novartis, Goldman Sachs, Deloitte and Children's Hospital. Lakshmi is currently a PhD candidate at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College where she researches and writes on the applications of improvisation and trust in negotiation and decision-making. Her current research includes a study of how trust development occurs, and is critical, in venture capital investing.