Professor Karthik Ramanna

Professor Karthik Ramanna

Supernumerary Fellow

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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

On Sustainable Capitalism

On Accounting & Auditing