拉凯什·库拉纳简介

拉凯什·库拉纳（Rakesh Khurana）——哈佛商学院组织行为学教授、世界顶级管理思想大师。获得哈佛大学的博士学位。

主要著作包括：
《寻找企业拯救者：无理性地追求有魅力的首席执行官》(Searching for a Corporate Saviour: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs)，2002
《从高目标到高技能：美国商学院的社会变迁——将管理学作为职业是无法履行的承诺》（”From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession,”普林斯顿大学出版社, 2007)
《哈佛商业评论之终极领导力》（HBR ON LEADERSHIP AT THE TOP）

Rakesh Khurana

Rakesh Khurana is the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development at the Harvard Business School. He teaches a doctoral seminar on Management and Markets and The Board of Directors and Corporate Governance in the MBA program.

Professor Khurana received his B.S. from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and his A.M. (Sociology) and Ph.D. in Organization Behavior from Harvard University. Prior to attending graduate school, he worked as a founding member of Cambridge Technology Partners in Sales and Marketing.

Professor Khurana’s research uses a sociological perspective to focus on the processes by which elites and leaders are selected and developed. He has written extensively about the CEO labor market with a particular interest on: the factors that lead to vacancies in the CEO position; the factors that affect the choice of successor; the role of market intermediaries such as executive search firms in CEO search; and the consequences of CEO succession and selection decisions for subsequent firm performance and strategic choices. He has published articles on Corp. Governance in the Harvard Business and Sloan Management Review. His book on the CEO labor market, Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs (Princeton University Press) was published in October, 2002. The book is an analysis of the labor market for CEOs.

In the book Khurana explains the basic mechanics of the market, how it differs from other labor markets, how it has changed in the past twenty years, and whether it is successful in placing the best candidates in the available jobs. He focuses on the growing tendency of boards of directors to ignore candidates inside their firms and to hire CEOs from outside. He seeks to show that this trend has emerged not because of the intrinsic merits of the “external market,” but because of the rise of investor capitalism and despite evidence that reliance on this market for CEO succession and executive compensation has serious problems that may threaten the viability of firms and the legitimacy of market capitalism.

Khurana’s current research grows out of the same interests in the social context of business leadership and the allocation of leadership positions that motivated his research on the CEO labor market. His most recent book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (2007: Princeton University Press), chronicles the evolution of management as a profession, with particular focus on the institutional development of the MBA. This research is rooted in the question of how certain occupations within business (not just executive management but also consulting, private equity, and investment banking) have come to require the MBA credential as a prerequisite for entry. The significance of this issue lies in its direct bearing on the question of how professional management has claimed and received legitimation for its role as the steward of a very substantial proportion of society’s material wealth and resources—a role that has itself been subject to changing interpretations over the decades since the phenomenon of professional management first appeared on the American scene.

Although there is a rich sociological literature on professions, it is focused, for the most part, on licensed professions such as medicine and law. He expects the results of this research on professions to have implications for our understanding of how, exactly, professional managers do, can, or should “contribute to the well-being of society”. Guiding questions in this research stream include: Where did our current shareholder-centered, agency-based view of the role of professional management come from—particularly in light of the very different one that underlay the founding of the first professional business schools and the granting to them of a place within the university? How does our current view of the role of the professional manager compare with the way that professional responsibility has traditionally been conceived in the other professions? In view of the way that professional roles have recently been evolving in professions such as law or medicine, do market forces inevitably undermine professional autonomy and standards? What would be the potential benefits and drawbacks of management becoming more like the other professions in its structure and culture than it has been during its history to date? Khurana’s work argues that without a re-commitment to the professionalization project, business schools risk devolving into narrow vocation schools and serving largely as a credentialing system, ultimately weakening the legitimacy of MBA programs and contributing to a business culture that garners low trust and low legitimacy in society.

From Higher Aims to Hired Hands received the American Sociological Association’s Max Weber Book Award in 2008 for most outstanding contribution to scholarship in the past two years. In 2007, the book was also the Winner of the 2007 Best Professional/Scholarly Publishing Book in Business, Finance and Management, Association of American Publishers.

Khurana’s work on the deficiencies of the CEO labor market and his research on business education is regularly featured by the general media such as: Business Week, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, CNBC, The Economist, Globe and Mail, The New Yorker, Chief Executive and Corporate Board Member magazine. He has also published opinion-editorials in some of these outlets. He has consulted to corporations and executive search firms to help improve their CEO succession, governance, and executive development practices. He has been recognized by the London Times as one of ‘The Thinkers 50’, a list of the fifty most influential management thinkers in the world.

Publications & Course Materials

Books

Nohria, Nitin, and Rakesh Khurana, eds. Handbook of Leadership and Theory Practice. Harvard Business Publishing, forthcoming.

Khurana, Rakesh. From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. (Winner of the 2007 Best Professional/Scholarly Publishing Book in Business, Finance and Management from the Association of American Publishers. Winner of the 2008 Max Weber Award for Best Book from the American Sociological Association Section on Organization, Occupations and Work .) Abstract

Is management a profession? Should it be? Can it be? This major work of social and intellectual history reveals how such questions have driven business education and shaped American management and society for more than a century. The book is also a call for reform. Rakesh Khurana shows that university-based business schools were founded to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors and lawyers but have effectively retreated from that goal, leaving a gaping moral hole at the center of business education and perhaps in management itself.

Khurana begins in the late nineteenth century, when members of an emerging managerial elite, seeking social status to match the wealth and power they had accrued, began working with major universities to establish graduate business education programs paralleling those for medicine and law. Constituting business as a profession, however, required codifying the knowledge relevant for practitioners and developing enforceable standards of conduct. Khurana, drawing on a rich set of archival material from business schools, foundations, and academic associations, traces how business educators confronted these challenges with varying strategies during the Progressive era and the Depression, the postwar boom years, and recent decades of freewheeling capitalism.

Today, Khurana argues, business schools have largely capitulated in the battle for professionalism and have become merely purveyors of a product, the MBA, with students treated as consumers. Professional and moral ideals that once animated and inspired business schools have been conquered by a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of share profits. According to Khurana, we should not thus be surprised at the rise of corporate malfeasance. The time has come, he concludes, to rejuvenate intellectually and morally the training of our future business leaders.

Khurana, Rakesh. Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Published Papers

Fisman, Raymond, Rakesh Khurana, and Edward Martenson. “Mission-Driven Governance.” Stanford Social Innovation Review (forthcoming). Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide a useful, easily applied theory of governance performance. The existing model is fundamentally adversarial, rooted in the paradigm of principal-agent conflict. At its base is an image of governance as a never-ending struggle between board members and executives – “principals” who guard the organization’s resources but have limited information to “monitor” how these resources are used and “agents” who have insider knowledge and control the information-filtering apparatus of the organizations. Many of the concepts and ideas in this traditional model are shaped by a long history of governance failure and organizational pathology. It suffices as a solution to the challenge of meeting legal compliance standards through formal systems, but we believe it utterly fails to show how to create a governance system that supports organizational effectiveness. We propose a framework that gives equal weight to creating a governance system whose effectiveness is measured by the achievement of the organization’s mission or purpose.

In this article, we argue that this reluctance to evaluate an organization’s governance against an organization’s stated mission, coupled with a narrow focus on a rules-based approach to governance, are jointly responsible for the persistence of problems in governance performance, despite decades of high-priority attention. These governance misconceptions translate into four basic barriers to effecting change:

1. Many leaders who are dissatisfied with the state of their organizations’ affairs are nevertheless resigned to it because they do not think it can be changed. They are schooled to think that solutions require new rules, but new rules are inadequate to treat the performance problems that they encounter most often.
2. The refusal to see governance as a performance element that can be improved may be viewed at least in part as a defense mechanism. No one likes to be evaluated, and board members have the power to avoid it. This might explain why only about one in ten nonprofit organizations have implemented governance evaluation routines.
3. When confronted with governance problems, we tend to follow the path of least resistance, seeking simplistic solutions with bright-line rules such as the policy/implementation division of labor for board and management. The difficulty, of course, is that governance is a highly complex activity, requiring decision makers to integrate many kinds of knowledge into a coherent whole.
4. Finally, the dominant model of governance that persists is fundamentally flawed and out of date. It simply doesn’t fit experience on the ground. Without a broadly accepted theory of governance performance to provide a standard against which organizations can evaluate and improve their practices, every decision maker applies their own tacit theory. These, in turn, tend to cancel each other out in a lowest-common-denominator way. An organization’s definition of “good governance” should be explicit and agreed to by all, not left to individual interpretation.

Khurana, Rakesh. “MBAs Gone Wild.” The American Interest (July – August 2009).

Nohria, Nitin, and Rakesh Khurana. “It’s Time to Make Management a True Profession.” Harvard Business Review 86, no. 10 (October 2008). Abstract
In the face of the recent institutional breakdown of trust in business, managers are losing legitimacy. To regain public trust, management needs to become a true profession in much the way medicine and law have, argue Khurana and Nohria of Harvard Business School. True professions have codes, and the meaning and consequences of those codes are taught as part of the formal education required of their members. Through these codes, professional institutions forge an implicit social contract with society: Trust us to control and exercise jurisdiction over an important occupational category, and, in return, we will ensure that the members of our profession are worthy of your trust – that they will not only be competent to perform the tasks entrusted to them, but that they will also conduct themselves with high standards and great integrity. The authors believe that enforcing educational standards and a code of ethics is unlikely to choke entrepreneurial creativity. Indeed, if the field of medicine is any indication, a code may even stimulate creativity. The main challenge in writing a code lies in reaching a broad consensus on the aims and social purpose of management. There are two deeply divided schools of thought. One school argues that management’s aim should simply be to maximize shareholder wealth; the other argues that management’s purpose is to balance the claims of all the firm’s stakeholders. Any code will have to steer a middle course in order to accommodate both the value-creating impetus of the shareholder value concept and the accountability inherent in the stakeholder approach.

Khurana, Rakesh, and Herbert Gintis. “What Is the Purpose of Business?” Your Turn. BizEd, January – February 2008.

Khurana, Rakesh. “Book review of Managing Elites: Professional Socialization in Law and Business Schools.” Contemporary Sociology 36, no. 2 (June 2007).

Khurana, Rakesh, and Christopher Marquis. “Diagnosing and Dissolving Our ‘Translation Gap’.” Journal of Management Inquiry 15, no. 4 (December 2006): 406-409.

Khurana, Rakesh. “Book review of Capitalism, Social Privilege and Managerial Ideologies.” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 5 (March 2006).

Khurana, Rakesh. “Review of Capitalism, Social Privilege and Managerial Ideologies, by Ernesto R. Gantman. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2005.” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 5 (March 2006): 1608-1611.

Snook, Scott, and Rakesh Khurana. “Comments on Glenn Hubbard’s Business, Knowledge, and Global Growth.” Capitalism and Society 1, no. 3 (2006).

Cohn, Jeff, Rakesh Khurana, and Laura Reeves. “Growing Talent As If Your Business Depended on It.” Harvard Business Review 83, no. 10 (October 2005).

Khurana, Rakesh, and Katharina Pick. “The Social Nature of Boards.” Brooklyn Law Review 70, no. 4 (summer 2005).

Podolny, Joel, Rakesh Khurana, and Marya Lisl Hill-Popper. “Revisiting the Meaning of Leadership.” Research in Organizational Behavior 26 (2005).

Khurana, Rakesh. “Book Review of Headhunters: Matchmaking in the Labor Market by William Finlay and James E. Coverdill, Cornell University Press, 2002.” Journal of Economic Literature XLII, no. 1 (March 2004).

Khurana, Rakesh, and Mikolaj Jan Piskorski. “Sources of Structural Inequality in Managerial Labor Markets.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 21 (2004): 169-187.

Khurana, Rakesh, and Scott A. Shane. “Bringing Individuals Back In: The Effects of Career Experience on New Firm Founding.” Industrial and Corporate Change 12, no. 5 (October 2003): 519-543.

Khurana, Rakesh. “Toward More Rational CEO Succession.” Chief Executive 187 (April 2003).

Khurana, Rakesh, and Jeff Cohn. “How to Succeed at CEO Succession: Aligning Strategy and Succession.” Directorship (Spring/2003).

Khurana, Rakesh. “The Curse of the Superstar CEO.” Harvard Business Review 80, no. 9 (September 2002).

Khurana, Rakesh. “Market Triads: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Market Intermediation.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 32, no. 2 (June 2002).

Sonnenfeld, Jeffrey, and Rakesh Khurana. “Fishing for CEOs in Your Own Backyard.” The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2002.

Khurana, Rakesh. “Good Charisma, Bad Business.” The New York Times, September 13, 2002.

Khurana, Rakesh, and Nicholas G. Carr. “Secrets of Succession.” The Financial Times, December 6, 2002.

Khurana, Rakesh. “Finding the Right CEO: Why Boards Often Make Poor Choices.” MIT Sloan Management Review 43, no. 1 (fall 2001): 91-96.

Lorsch, J. W., and Rakesh Khurana. “Changing Leaders: The Board’s Role in CEO Succession.” Harvard Business Review 77, no. 3 (May-June 1999).

Book Chapters

Kanter, Rosabeth M. and Rakesh Khurana. “Position and Emotion: The Significance of Georg Simmel’s Structural Theories for Leadership and Organizational Behavior.” In Organization Studies and Classical Social Theory, edited by Paul S. Adler. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

Snook, Scott A. and Rakesh Khurana. “The End of the Great Man.” In The Essential Bennis, 138-159. Jossey Bass, 2009.

Khurana, Rakesh and Herbert Gintis. “Corporate Honesty and Business Education: A Behavioral Model.” In Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy, edited by Paul J. Zak. Princeton University Press, 2008.

Khurana, Rakesh. “Leadership and the Social Construction of Charisma.” In Handbook on Responsible Leadership and Governance in Global Business, edited by J. Doh and S. Strumpf, 112-136. U.K.: Edward Elgar, Inc, 2005.

Khurana, Rakesh, Nitin Nohria and Daniel Penrice. “Management as a Profession.” Chap. 3 in Restoring Trust in American Business, edited by Jay W. Lorsch, Andy Zelleke and Leslie Berlowitz. Cambridge: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2005.

Snook, Scott and Rakesh Khurana. “Developing ‘Leaders of Character’: Lessons from West Point.” In Leadership and Governance from the Inside Out, edited by Robert Gandossy and Jeffrey Sonnenfeld. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2004.

Other Papers

Fourcade, Marion, and Rakesh Khurana. “From Social Control to Financial Economics: The Linked Ecologies of Economics and Business in Twentieth Century America.” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 09-037, September 2008. Abstract

As the main producers of managerial elites, business schools represent strategic research sites for understanding the formation of economic practices and representations. This article draws on historical material to analyze the changing place of economics in American business education over the course of the twentieth century. We use the Wharton School as an illustration of the earliest trends and dilemmas (c. 1900-1930), when business schools found themselves caught between their business connections and their striving for moral legitimacy in higher education. We show how several of the school’s leaders were closely involved in progressive reforms and presided over the development of the empirical social sciences to address questions of labor regulation and control within manufacturing industries. Next, we look at the creation of the Carnegie Tech Graduate School of Industrial Administration after World War II. This episode illustrates the increasingly successful claims of social scientists, backed by philanthropic foundations, on business education and the growing appeal of “scientific” approaches to decision-making and management. We also show that these transformations were homologically related to changes in the prevailing mode of governance in the American economy: business schools became essential sites for the development of tools and methods for the management of the new large, diversified conglomerates (input-output approaches, linear programming, forecasting). Finally, we argue that the rise of the Chicago Business School from the 1960s onwards marks the decisive ascendancy of economics, and particularly financial economics, in business education over the other behavioral disciplines, as well as the decisive ascendancy of business schools as producers of economic knowledge. By following teacher-student networks, we also document the key role of business schools in diffusing “Chicago-style” economic approaches-offering support for anti-regulatory approaches and popularizing narrowly financial understandings of the firm (Fligstein 1990, 2002), which sociologists have described as characteristic of the modern neo-liberal regime.

Fisman, Ray, Julia Galef, and Rakesh Khurana. “Estimating the value of connections to Vice-President Cheney.” Working Paper, 2006.

Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, Rakesh Khurana, and Nitin Nohria. “Moving Higher Education to the Next Stage: A New Set of Societal Challenges, a New Stage of Life, and a Call to Action for Universities.” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 06-021, 2005.

Fisman, Raymond, Rakesh Khurana, and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf. “Governance and CEO Turnover: Do Something or Do the Right Thing?” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 05-066, 2005.

Podolny, Joel M., Rakesh Khurana, and Marya Hill-Popper. “Revisiting the Meaning of Leadership.” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 05-030, 2004.

Khurana, Rakesh, and Mikolaj J. Piskorski. “Sources of Structural Inequality in Managerial Labor Markets.” Stanford University Research Paper Series, 2003.

Research Thrust

I am trained in organizational sociology and my main areas of interest lie in macro-organizational theory and the dynamics of executive labor markets. To date, my research has focused on two themes. The first revolves around understanding the forces that govern the processes of chief executive officer (CEO) change in large, publicly-held corporations. I pursue research in this area primarily by combining the flexibility of network theory with a deep field-based understanding of the phenomenon. I consider myself part of a growing group of scholars who employ the network perspective and field-based knowledge to re-frame classical economic and sociological explanations of organizational decisions and market outcomes. This approach holds out the promise of a more empirically grounded model of organizational action and a conception that many organizational actions, usually thought to be primarily responsive to objective economic factors such as firm performance and incentives, are also responsive to a variety of social factors including position in a social structure. I view this approach to be a vital infusion of sociological imagination into theoretical territory and empirical settings that have suffered by its absence.

The research I have conducted on the CEO labor market has focused on four interrelated processes in this area: the factors that lead to vacancies in the CEO position; factors that affect the choice of successor; the role of market intermediaries such as executive search firms in CEO search; and the consequences of CEO succession and selection decisions for subsequent firm performance and strategic choices.

My current research plans grow out of the same interests in the social context of business leadership and the allocation of leadership positions that have motivated my research on the CEO labor market. My first set of projects focus on the ‘managerial’ implications of my research on the CEO labor market. Here, I am developing cases, articles, and essays about CEO succession and the problems of existence governance institutions that will be published in more managerially-oriented outlets.

The second major subject that I am now beginning to study is the evolution of management as a profession. My thoughts on this topic are rooted in the question of how certain occupations within business (not just executive management but also consulting, private equity, and investment banking) have come to require the MBA credential as a prerequisite for entry. The significance of this issue lies in its direct bearing on the question of how professional management has claimed and received legitimation for its role as the steward of a very substantial proportion of society’s material wealth and resources—a role that has itself been subject to changing interpretations over the decades since the phenomenon of professional management first appeared on the American scene.

Although there is a rich sociological literature on professions, it is focused, for the most part, on licensed professions such as medicine and law. This literature argues that professions are occupational groups that claim jurisdiction over particular arenas of work. In order to claim jurisdiction, a profession must ask “society to recognize its cognitive structure through exclusive rights” (Abbott, 1988: 59). Scholars studying professions argue that societal recognition of such claims, which is what results in the granting of professional status and privileges, is usually achieved either through the legal system or in the realm of public opinion. Law and medicine are professions that rely on the legal system (i.e., state licensing boards). Journalism and social work are examples of professions that are more dependent on public opinion for their ability to monopolize particular types of work. In this context, professional management is unique in that it has relied on neither legal authority for, nor public endorsement of, its claims of jurisdiction over managerial tasks in large publicly held corporations, investment banks, and so forth. Instead—according to my working hypothesis—its jurisdictional authority has been achieved through an interdependent relationship between university-based business schools (which derive a certain measure of their own legitimacy from the university itself, an institution that other American professions have in effect licensed to provide training and credentialing for aspiring professionals) and the corporate workplace. I intend to test this hypothesis by exploring the history of professional business education and the development of particular business occupations that have arisen and evolved in tandem with the university-based business schools.

I expect the results of my research on professions to have implications for our understanding of how, exactly, professional managers do, can, or should “contribute to the well-being of society”. Relevant questions that I hope to answer include: Where did our current shareholder-centered, agency-based view of the role of professional management come from—particularly in light of the very different one that underlay the founding of the first professional business schools and the granting to them of a place within the university? How does our current view of the role of the professional manager compare with the way that professional responsibility has traditionally been conceived in the other professions? In view of the way that professional roles have recently been evolving in professions such as law or medicine, do market forces inevitably undermine professional autonomy and standards? What would be the potential benefits and drawbacks of management becoming more like the other professions in its structure and culture than it has been during its history to date?

Nitin Nohria and I have been writing about making management a profession. HBS students have taken the lead in this area. See the oath and its signatories here. Read about it in Wikipedia, too!

Market Triads: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Market Intermediation (Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, June 2002)

This paper examines the role of executive search firms in CEO search. The paper argues that the numerical shift from two party market transactions (e.g. buyers and sellers) to three party transactions (e.g. buyers, sellers, and third party) transforms market exchanges and the roles of the various participants in these exchanges in ways not anticipated by existing theories. At the heart of my findings is a perspective that describes ESFs as intermediaries to a complex labor market exchange. As intermediaries, the role of the third-party is not to broker relationships between two parties that are disconnected from each other; rather the role is to create a working relationship between two parties that are quite well aware of each other’s existence. The identification of the intermediary role in markets presents a theoretical challenge to the existing brokerage literature in sociology, which characterizes the third party as an opportunistic actor bringing together two unconnected actors. One implication of the existing theoretical research is that if the two other actors could communicate directly with each other, the third would not be needed. Yet this is clearly not the case in the CEO labor market, where directors and candidates are often acutely aware of each other’s existence, but where their relationship is defined largely through an intermediary.

The Strategic and Performance Consequences of CEO Succession

The argument of this paper (with Nitin Nohria) is that research on executive turnover treats the departures of predecessors and the origin of successors as independent events. This approach has led to mixed empirical findings with respect to measuring the effects of executive turnover on firm performance. Using a panel data set, we show that the conditions under which the predecessor departs (forced versus natural turnover) and the origin of the successor (insider versus outsider) are theoretically coupled phenomena with distinct combinations leading to differences in subsequent performance.

Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs ( Princeton University Press, October 2002)

In this book, I argue that the external CEO labor market was born in a burst of rhetoric about wresting control of corporations away from a group of self-interested insiders, as senior managers in the era of managerial capitalism had come to be portrayed. The rationale for expanding CEO search beyond the confines of the internal labor market was that it would open the CEO position to a broader group of individuals who brought greater talents and breadth of “vision” than could be found within any one company, and who had little vested interest in the status quo. The external CEO market thus expropriated the principles of the market and the logic of competition. It proposed to take a closed system and crack it open. Based on evidence presented in the book, I argue, however, the external CEO succession process, as it currently operates, is anything but an open, competitive system. While today’s CEO labor market is defended as if it were a market in the classical sense, it is, in reality, nothing of the sort. Far from being the “institution-free” mechanism portrayed by economists and even some sociologists, the external CEO search process is governed at every stage by structural rules and institutions previously thought to be confined to the firm. In the process as it actually unfolds in one large firm after another, external institutions such as socially-based categories of eligibility, the evaluations of investors and the media, and outside intermediaries (i.e., executive search firms) play a central role in controlling access to jobs and facilitating or hindering mobility. Because the external CEO market deviates in critical ways from the kinds of markets described by classical economics, its outcomes cannot be assumed to optimal and efficient—as, indeed, they turn out not to be when examined critically. To take just one example, as a result of the workings of the external institutions governing the external CEO selection process, many individuals who could be CEOs are not even on the radar screens of those who could be tapping them for the position. Thus the external CEO search process has created a permanently closed ecosystem of top-tier executives for whom what looks like a glass ceiling from below is, viewed from above, perfectly opaque, since it hides those on the lower floors from the view of directors and search firms. This is not only a waste of talent but also, as it turns out, a recipe for returning corporations to the kind of oligarchic control from which external CEO search was supposed to deliver them.

Bringing Individuals Back In: The Effects of Career Experience on New Firm Founding (forthcoming Industrial and Corporate Change, 2003)

In this paper (with Scott Shane) the link between the career experiences of potential entrepreneurs and the decision to found a new firm is explored. Because of methodological and theoretical obstacles, sociological research on organizational foundings has largely focused on societal and population level factors to explain firm foundings. This paper takes the view that understanding firm foundings also requires linking to micro-level processes. We suggest that careers are a useful way to link individual-level processes to firm foundings. We test our explanation on the population of inventions patented at MIT over the 1980-1996 period and examine the effect of inventors’ prior experiences on the probability that an invention will be commercialized through the founding of a new organization. This paper received the 2001 Academy of Management Best Paper award in the Organization and Management Theory division .

Secrets of Succession (Financial Times, December 6, 2002, with Nicholas Carr)

Boards often choose a new chief executive in response to outside pressures, skewed perceptions and simple convenience. In this extended essay, we argue for a return to objectivity and rigour in the selection process.

Areas of Interest

Primary Interests
boards of directors
corporate governance
leadership
market institutions
organizational behavior

Additional Topics
agency theory
compensation
corporate accountability
corporate social responsibility
economic institutions
education
human resource management
incentives
networks
power and influence

Industries
executive search

Geographical Areas
Eastern Europe
Europe
France
Germany
North America
Turkey
United States
Western Europe