Karthik Ramanna

Amidst deepening divisions in society today, how can leaders ensure that their businesses continue to operate effectively, stay resilient, and even grow?

With public confidence in our core institutions at alarming lows and polarization in society at dangerous highs, leaders need to cultivate new capabilities to keep their organizations together and to help people around them thrive, notes Karthik Ramanna, Ph.D. At the core of getting this done is continually building and rebuilding trust, he observes.

“One of the essential elements to any civilization is its capacity sustain trust,” explains Ramanna, who from 2016 to 2023 directed Oxford’s Master of Public Policy program, a flagship for Rhodes Scholars. “If we are to find our way out of this deeply polarized time, our leaders must invest anew in the art and science of growing trust. This requires a commitment and follow-up both on formal processes that are verifiable and on more informal practices that help divided communities identify and sustain shared beliefs.”

As an advisor to senior leaders and through engaging keynotes and workshops, Ramanna offers practical frameworks for achieving both goals – leading in a time of societal discord and reliably measuring and reporting on sustainability efforts.

Practical Solutions for Leading in a Polarized World

In his upcoming book, “The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World” (Harvard Business Review Press, October 2024), Ramanna expands on his popular Oxford course, “Managing in the Age of Outrage” and its companion HBR article to provide leaders with steps they can take to make sense of the animosity around them, work constructively to overcome it, and emerge as a stronger organization.

“Managing in the age of outrage is different from managing outrage. The latter is simply crisis management, which we have to do from time to time and then get on with our daily lives. The former requires a new way of thinking, because we have to go beyond the proverbial ‘fire-fighting’ to fire-prevention and learn how to thrive by doing that,” explains Ramanna, who has had more than 1,000  leadership scholars from over 120 countries take his course. “Leaders today need to build a whole new functional capability for managing in the age of outrage, just as they have functional capabilities for finance, marketing, supply-chains, etc.”

In the book, Ramanna offers a practical 5-stage framework with step-by-step recommendations for how leaders can help address this critical business and societal challenge. Drawing on disciplines as diverse as neuroscience and literary criticism, together with common sense wisdom and real-world case studies, he provides an accessible toolkit for a new resilient managerial system for today’s increasingly divided society.

Using Financial Accounting as a Model for Measuring Decarbonization and Sustainability Efforts

Many agree that addressing global climate change is more urgent than ever, but “a patchwork of voluntary carbon disclosure efforts by companies has paradoxically facilitated greenwashing by some and affected public trust in corporate sustainability efforts overall.”

Among the world’s top authorities on corporate financial accounting and auditing, Ramanna urges corporations to implement that same rigorous approach to measuring decarbonization efforts and eventually to sustainability activities more generally.

To address this, Ramanna and Harvard Business School senior fellow Robert S. Kaplan have created The E-Liability Institute, a non-profit that aims to give organizations a verifiable global method for accounting for their carbon emissions and offsets. The Institute’s E-liability method is the only-known system to accurately report corporate greenhouse gas emissions to a “true-and-fair” assurance standard across supply and distribution chains.

“Disclosure without an underlying fundamental basis of auditable accounting very quickly becomes puffery,” explains Ramanna, author of “Political Standards” (2016), a corporate governance classic on how to design robust accounting principles. “If we’re going to get serious about climate change, we need to build a bedrock of carbon accounting rigor similar to how we have built and improved financial accounting over the years.”

Ramanna helps leaders understand the important role that universal, accurate accounting plays in successful corporate responsibility and sustainability initiatives and how a standardized global method for measuring carbon emissions and footprints is crucial to creating new sources of value for shareholders and society at large.

Ultimately, Ramanna’s frameworks and tools help nurture greater trust in business and society. He offers organizations practical approaches for leading in today’s heated social climate, accurately accounting for climate change initiatives, and designing reporting standards that promote transparency and stability in the global financial system.

Karthik Ramanna, Ph.D., has authored dozens of research articles and case studies on non-market strategies in Africa, China, the EU, India and the U.S. His scholarship has won numerous awards, including the Journal of Accounting & Economics Best Paper Prize and three-times the Case Centre’s Outstanding Case-Writer prize, dubbed by the Financial Times as “the business school Oscars.”

Ramanna founded and leads Oxford’s Transformational Leadership Fellowship, a bespoke, by-invitation, part-time program for senior corporate executives considering a second career that can bring their strengths to address broader societal challenges. He also founded Oxford’s Case Centre on Public Leadership and directed Oxford’s Master of Public Policy program, a flagship one-year degree for current and prospective leaders in government.

Prior to his roles at Oxford, Ramanna taught leadership, corporate governance and accounting at the Harvard Business School in both the MBA and senior executive education programs and has served as a faculty associate at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

With a doctorate from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Ramanna has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including as co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Accounting, Economics and Law.

Karthik Ramanna is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers & Advisors, a division of Stern Strategy Group^®.