Nitin Nohria, the Richard P Chapman Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School will become the School's 10th dean come July 1, Harvard President Drew Faust announced on Tuesday.
The announcement carried in the Harvard Gazette, said Nohria, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, would succeed Jay Light, who announced his retirement at the end of the 2009-2010 academic year after serving five years as dean and decades as a distinguished member of the Harvard Business School faculty.
Nohria, current co-chair of the HBS Leadership Initiative and a member of the HBS faculty since 1988, has previously been the school's senior associate dean for faculty development and chair of its Organizational Behavior Unit.
Faust, in naming Nohria, said, "At a pivotal moment for Harvard Business School and for business education more generally, I am delighted that Nitin Nohria has agreed to lead Harvard Business School forward."
She described him as "an outstanding scholar, teacher, and mentor, with a global outlook and an instinct for collaboration across traditional boundaries," and added: "He has an intimate knowledge of the School and a strong appetite for innovation."
"He cares deeply about the achool's commitment to both rigour and relevance - to serious scholarship that has a powerful impact on practice," Faust said. "And, he's a person who not only studies leadership but embodies the qualities of a leader in how he engages people and ideas, in how he thinks about organiaational change, and in how he sees the consequential challenges ahead."
Nohria said that he was "grateful to President Faust for this opportunity, and I feel humbled and privileged to follow many outstanding deans, including Jay Light."
"I feel a profound sense of responsibility for continuing Harvard Business School's proud legacy of groundbreaking ideas and transformational educational experiences," he said.
Nohria argued that "with business education at an inflection point, we must strive to equip future leaders with the competence and character to address emerging global business and social challenges."
He said that "as we enter our second century, I look forward to working with the School's faculty, staff, students, and alumni to forge a vision for Harvard Business School that will enable it to remain a beacon for business education for the next 100 years."
Light showered kudos on his successor saying, "Nitin Nohria will be a wonderful dean of Harvard Business School. He is widely respected within our extended community as a perceptive scholar of leadership and as a thoughtful and able academic leader."
"He believes deeply in the distinctive mission of the school and its role in the world," he added, and predicted that Nohria "will effectively carry forward the objectives and the strategies that make this institution a very special place."
Nohria received his bachelor of technology degree in chemical engineering in 1984 from IIT, Bombay, which awarded him its Distinguished Alumni Medal in 2007. He received his PhD in management in 1988 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, where he earned the Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award in behavioral and policy sciences.
He joined the HBS faculty immediately after receiving his PhD, as an assistant professor, was appointed associate professor in 1993, received tenure in 1997, and was promoted to his current chair as Richard P Chapman Professor of Business Administration in 1999.
Nohria has co-written or edited 16 books, and authored more than 50 articles and dozens of teaching cases and notes. His most recent book, which he co-edited with Rakesh Khurana, titled 'Handbook of Leadership, Theory & Practice,' published earlier this year, reflects the colloquium he organised as part of the Harvard Business School's centennial in 2008 to stimulate serious scholarly research on leadership.
His 1997 book, 'The Differentiated Network: Organizing Multinational Corporations for Value Creation,' won the Academy of Management's George R Terry Book Award granted annually to the book judged to have made the most outstanding contribution to the advancement of management knowledge.
Nohria, who has taught across the Business School's MBA, doctoral, and executive education programs, recently taught a program titled 'Building a Global Enterprise in India.'
Earlier this year, he was also one of four instructors for Harvard Schools who co-designed and taught a team workshop on Faith and Leadership in a Fragmented World.
One of the most prestigious business schools in the country, which was founded in 1908, as part of Harvard University, HBS located on the 40-acre campus in Boston, boasts of a faculty of more than 200 and offers full-time programs leading to an MBA and doctoral degrees, as well as more than 140 open enrollment and custom executive education programs.
