Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration 

Ranjay Gulati is an expert on leadership, strategy, and organizational issues in firms. His recent work explores leadership and strategic challenges for building high growth organizations in turbulent markets. Some of his prior work has focused on the enablers and implications of within-firm and inter-firm collaboration. He has looked at both when and how firms should leverage greater connectivity within and across their boundaries to enhance performance.

In a forthcoming book, Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Organization (January, 2010, Harvard Business Press), he explores how “resilient” companies—those that prosper both in good times and bad—drive growth and increase profitability by immersing themselves in the lives of their customers. Based on more than a decade of research in a range of industries including manufacturing, retail, professional services, media, information technology, and healthcare, the book uncovers the path to resilience by showing companies how to break down internal barriers that impede action, build bridges across divisions, and create a network of collaborators.  His previous book, Managing Network Resources: Alliances, Affiliations, and other Relational Assets (Oxford University Press, 2007), examines the implications of firms’ growing portfolio of inter-firm connections. He demonstrates how firms increasingly are scaling back what they consider to be their core activities, and at the same time expanding their array of offerings to customers by entering into a web of collaborations. He discusses some of his most influential and most often cited findings that a firm's portfolio of connections can be a powerful catalyst that shapes the future trajectory of it's partnerships by serving as a valuable referral network that can provide information about future ties and also engenders trust that impacts the governance structure used to formalize ties. He has also co-edited a number of other books that focus on the dynamics of competition in emerging technology-intensive industries.

Professor Gulati is the past-President of the Business Policy and Strategy Division at the Academy of Management and an elected fellow of the Strategic Management Society. He was ranked as one of the top ten most cited scholars in Economics and Business over a decade by ISI-Incite. The Economist Intelligence Unit has listed him as among the top handful of business school scholars whose work is most relevant to management practice. He has been a Harvard MacArthur Fellow and a Sloan Foundation Fellow.  His research has been published in leading journals such as American Journal of Sociology, Strategic Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, and Organization Science. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, strategy+business, and the Financial Times. Professor Gulati sits on the editorial board of several leading journals including Administrative Science Quarterly and Strategic Management Journal. He was a co-editor of a special issue of the Strategic Management Journal on Alliances and Strategic Networks in 2000 and will be co-editing another special issue on Organizational Architecture in 2010.

Professor Gulati teaches courses in Harvard Business School’s MBA and Executive Education programs. He has directed several executive programs on such topics as Building and Leading Customer Centric Organizations, Managing Customer Relationships, Managing Strategic Alliances, Mergers & Acquisitions, and Sustaining Competitive Advantage in a Network Economy.  He is also active in custom executive education. He has received a number of awards for his teaching including the Best Professor Award for his teaching in the MBA and executive MBA programs at the Kellogg School where he was on the faculty prior to coming to Harvard.

Professor Gulati advises and speaks to corporations large and small around the globe. Some of his representative speaking and consulting clients include: GE, SAP, Bank of China, Sanofi Aventis, Novartis, Caterpillar, Allergan, Metlife, Target, Honda, Qualcomm, Aetna, Future Brands, Ford, Seyfarth Shaw, SAP, LaFarge, McGraw-Hill, Rockwell Collins, Lafarge, Merck, General Mills, Abbott Laboratories, Baxter, Credit Suisse, and Microsoft. He has served on the advisory boards of several startup companies and has appeared as an expert witness in business litigations.

He is a frequent guest on CNBC and has been a panelist on several of their series on topics that include: the Business of Innovation, Collaboration, and Leadership Vision. He has also been interviewed by such media as Businessweek, the Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune.

Professor Gulati holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, a Master's Degree in Management from M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, and two Bachelor's Degrees, in Computer Science and Economics, from Washington State University and St. Stephens College, New Delhi, respectively.  He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.