
Professor Karthik Ramanna
Biography
Karthik Ramanna is Professor of Business & Public Policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and a fellow of St. John’s College. He teaches a popular course at Oxford on managing organisations in polarised times, which led to his 2024 book The Age of Outrage.
An expert on business-government relations, sustainable capitalism, and corporate reporting & auditing, Professor Ramanna studies how organizations and leaders build trust with stakeholders. His scholarship has won numerous awards, including the Journal of Accounting & Economics Best Paper Prize, the Harvard Business Review-McKinsey Prize for 'groundbreaking management thinking', and three times the international Case Centre’s prizes for 'outstanding case-writing', dubbed by the Financial Times as 'the business school Oscars'.
At Oxford, Professor Ramanna established the Case Centre on Public Leadership and the Transformational Leadership Fellowship, the latter a bespoke, by-invitation programme for senior leaders looking to reimagine their public-service impact. In 2022, he co-founded the non-profit E-liability Institute, where he serves as principal investigator, with a mission to drive decarbonisation processes through rigorous GHG accounting. From 2016 to 2023, he was director of Oxford’s Master of Public Policy programme that has educated over a thousand public leaders from about 120 countries. From July 2023, Professor Ramanna is on partial public-service leave from Oxford to advise the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, an 'auditor of auditors' in global markets.
Previously, he was a professor and the Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School, teaching leadership, corporate governance, and accounting in both the MBA and senior executive-education programs. He has a doctorate from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He lives in Oxford with his husband, Jon, and they enjoy dinner parties and touring Caravaggios.
Research Interests
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.)