Professor Karthik Ramanna

Karthik Ramanna is Professor of Business & Public Policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. An expert on business-government relations, sustainable capitalism, and corporate reporting & auditing, Professor Ramanna studies how organizations and leaders build trust with stakeholders. He has authored dozens of research articles and case studies on leadership and public-policy issues in Africa, Canada, China, Europe, India, Japan, Latin America, and the US, and he has consulted with several leading commercial and public organizations worldwide. His scholarship has won numerous awards, including the Journal of Accounting & Economics Best Paper Prize and three times the international Case Centre’s prizes for outstanding case-writing, dubbed by the Financial Times as “the business school Oscars.” In 2022, he won the Harvard Business Review-McKinsey prize for “groundbreaking management thinking” for joint work on rigorous climate accounting.

Professor Ramanna is director of Oxford’s Master in Public Policy program, a flagship one-year degree for current and prospective leaders in government. He is founder and faculty chair of the Transformational Leadership Fellowship, a bespoke, by-invitation program for senior leaders looking to reimagine their public-service impact. He also founded and directs Oxford’s Case Centre for Public Leadership, and he is fellow and member of the finance and investment committees at St. John’s College.

Previously, Professor Ramanna taught leadership, corporate governance, and accounting at the Harvard Business School in both the MBA and senior executive-education programs. He has a doctorate from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including as co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Accounting, Economics & Law.

He lives in Oxford with his husband, Jon, and they enjoy dinner parties and touring Caravaggios.

On Management & Leadership

• “Managing in the Age of Outrage”, SSRN Working Paper (2022). (A practical, how-to guide for organisational leaders in a time of deep polarisation, based on my eponymous Oxford course.)
• “Healing Fractured Societies: The Oxford Programme Building Unlikely Coalitions”, Times Higher Education (2020). (I describe how the Oxford MPPs from over 100 countries have built a collaborative community of public service.)
• “Building Better Judgment Amongst Policymakers Using the Case-Study Method”, Oxford Blavatnik School Technical Note (2020). (Beyond analytical skills and moral reasoning, universities must impart an education in good judgement: this is essential to developing competent generalists, who should be our political leaders in society. Related FT comment here.)

On Sustainable Capitalism

• “Friedman at 50: Is it Still the Social Responsibility of Business to Increase Profits?” California Management Review (2020). (Read why ‘Inclusive Capitalism’ can be dangerous for democracy.)
• “Thin Political Markets: The Soft Underbelly of Capitalism”, California Management Review (2015). (Read how experts use their tacit knowledge of esoteric matters to undermine market capitalism.)
• “Should America Still Believe in Free Markets?”, The American Interest (2020). (I describe the economic forces that are tearing apart America’s liberal consensus, and, arguing that there is no better alternative to liberalism at present, I offer a way forward.)

On Accounting & Auditing

• “Accounting for Climate Change”, Harvard Business Review (2022). (An auditable, cost-effective, and easy-to-use approach to supply-chain carbon accounting to replace the flawed “Scope 3” approach: winner of the HBR-McKinsey prize.)
• “Building a Culture of Challenge in Audit Firms”, PwC Future of Audit Initiative (2019). (Part of a series on audit and governance reform; more here)
• “The International Politics of IFRS Harmonization”, Accounting, Economics and Law — A Convivium (2013). (Read how the idealist project to create a common accounting language worldwide was hijacked by domestic and international politics.)