Remembering Sumantra Ghoshal

Sumantra Ghoshal, MIT Sloan PhD recipient, internationally acclaimed management thinker and frequent MIT Sloan Management Review contributor, died of a brain aneurysm March 3, 2004, at age 55. His graceful, clearly expressed, contrarian insights on what makes companies great will be missed by many at MIT Sloan and around the world.

Sumantra was a big-picture guy who counterintuitively saw how each individual in a corporation is indispensable to competitiveness. He saw the forest and the trees. As such, he may have been the embodiment of the MIT Sloan School's “Business as Un-Usual” mantra. In a world largely devoted to numbers, Sumantra showed how the individual, so often lost in today's hierarchical structures, was essential for “unleashing organizational energy and marshalling it in support of key strategic goals.” In numerous SMR articles, he explained, for example, how leading companies find ways for managers to cross a personal Rubicon to deep, action-oriented commitment — or how great companies energize employees at all levels as the surest way to achieve sustainable success.

Among his best-known books are Managing Across Borders (1989) and The Individualized Corporation (1997), both of which he wrote with Harvard professor and SMR co-author Christopher A. Bartlett. A Bias for Action: How Effective Managers Harness Their Willpower To Achieve Results, was written with Heike Bruch and is scheduled for release April 1, 2004. Sumantra's most recent SMR articles are “Integrating the Enterprise,” with Lynda Gratton (2002), “Going Beyond Motivation to the Power of Volition,” with Heike Bruch (2003), and “Unleashing Organizational Energy,” also with Bruch (2003).

As Robert P. Bauman Professor of Strategic Leadership at London Business School, a fellow at the Advanced Institute of Management Research, a fellow at the Academy of International Business and previously a professor at the INSEAD business school in France, Sumantra was known as a modest and thoughtful person who didn't let fame go to his head. Even after numerous accomplishments in the wider world, he returned to his native India often to teach. He was one of the movers and shakers behind the establishment of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.

Eleanor Westney, who supervised Sumantra's MIT Sloan dissertation and became a friend and co-author, remembers his uniqueness and originality: “He is an enormous loss to the field because his first instinct with any assertion or piece of conventional wisdom was to challenge it. And the more widely accepted the wisdom, the more aggressively he went after it. He also cared passionately about generating useful knowledge — knowledge that would make a difference to how people did things, not just how they thought about things.” Adds Prof. Don Lessard, “Sumantra was intense in everything he did. While he sometimes created discomfort as a result, he genuinely cared about deepening the understanding of management and caused those he interacted with to reach harder. He was a most vibrant member of the strategy community.”

As Sumantra's longtime assistant at London Business School, Sharon Wilson has firsthand experience of the value he placed on an organization's employees. “Life at London Business School is not the same,” she says. “The bright light has gone out.”

Sumantra Ghoshal leaves his wife, Susmita, his two sons, Siddhartha and Ananda, of London, and his parents and brothers in Bangalore.