Srikant M. Datar is the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Accounting at Harvard University. 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.

Cited by his students as a dedicated and innovative teacher, Datar received the George Leland Bach Award for Excellence in the Classroom at Carnegie Mellon University and the Distinguished Teaching Award at Stanford 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 (forthcoming).

Datar's research interests are in the cost management and management control areas. He has published his research on activity-based management, quality, productivity, time-based competition, new product development, bottleneck management, incentives and 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. He has served on the editorial board of several journals and presented his research to corporate executives and academic audiences in North America, South America, Asia, Africa and Europe.

Datar serves on the Board of Directors of Novartis AG, ICF International, KPIT Cummins Info Systems Ltd., Stryker Corporation, and Harvard Business Publishing, and has worked with many corporations on consulting and field-based projects. He is a member of the American Accounting Association and the Institute of Management Accountants.

About Professor David Garvin

David A. Garvin is the C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He joined the Business School faculty in 1979 and has since then taught courses in leadership, general management, and operations in the MBA and Advanced Management programs, as well as serving as chair of the Elective Curriculum and faculty chair of the School's Teaching and Learning Center. He has also taught in executive education programs and consulted for over fifty organizations around the globe, including Biogen Idec, Booz-Allen & Hamilton, BP, Frito-Lay, Gillette, L. L. Bean, 3M, Mitsubishi, Morgan Stanley, Mueller, Novartis, RPG, Seagate, and the U.S. Forest Service.

Professor Garvin's research interests lie in the areas of general management and strategic change. He is especially interested in organizational learning, business and management processes, and the design and leadership of large, complex organizations. He is also deeply interested in case method teaching. He is the author or co-author of ten books, including Rethinking the MBA, General Management: Processes and Action, Learning in Action, Education for Judgement, and Managing Quality; more than thirty articles, including "The Multiunit Enterprise," "Change Through Persuasion," "What Every CEO Should Know About Creating New Businesses," and "What You Don't Know About Making Decisions;" eight CD-ROMs and videotape series, including A Case Study Teacher in Action, Working Smarter, and Putting the Learning Organization to Work; and over fifty HBS case studies, multimedia exercises, and technical notes. He is a three-time winner of the McKinsey Award, given annually for the best article in Harvard Business Review; a winner of the Beckhard Prize, given annually for the best article on planned change and organizational development in Sloan Management Review; and a winner of the Smith-Weld Prize, given annually for the best article on the University in Harvard Magazine.

Professor Garvin received an A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1974, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. in 1979, where he held a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship.

Prior to coming to the Business School, he worked as an economist for both the Federal Trade Commission, studying federal energy policies, and the Sloan Commission on Government and Higher Education, studying the impact of federal regulation on the academic and financial policies of colleges and universities. From 1988-1990 he served as a member of the Board of Overseers of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, and from 1991-1992 he served on the Manufacturing Studies Board of the National Research Council. He served on the Board of Directors of Emerson Hospital from 2002-2006.

In his spare time, he enjoys hiking, bicycling, and travel. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts with his wife, Lynn, and his daughters, Diana and Cynthia.

Each month (summer months excluded), HBS offers a one-hour audio-only conference call to HBS alumni who are paid members of all registered alumni clubs throughout the world. This unique series of events produced by HBS will feature business topics of exceptional importance and significant current interest to HBS alumni, with a selected HBS professor making a brief presentation. A Q&A session, with questions submitted to the moderator in real time (via email), will follow.

We supply the conference call number and professor, and you listen in! All you have to do is put your phone on "mute" and listen to the most up-to-date comments and insights regarding the topic at hand.  Questions can be submitted via e-mail, either before-hand or in real time during the call. VLS events are exclusively available to paid members of the HBS Clubs only.

Listen to past VLS calls here.  (Club members only.)