Rakesh Khurana

Rakesh Khurana is the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School. He is also the co-Master of Cabot House at Harvard University. Rakesh received his degrees in organizational behavior from Harvard's Ph.D. program in 1998, A.M (Sociology) from Harvard in 1997, and his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1990. He worked for three years as a founding team member of Cambridge Technology Partners before starting graduate school in 1994. After finishing his doctorate, Rakesh taught at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In 2000, Rakesh accepted an appointment at the Harvard Business School. His research focuses on managerial labor markets and the processes by which elites are selected and socialized.

He has researched and written articles and books on executive labor markets, the institutional and intellectual history of business schools, and the conceptual foundations for leadership as an academic field. He is the author of the book, Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs and related academic and managerial articles on the pitfalls of charismatic leadership. His work in this area is regularly featured by the general media, and he has also published opinion-editorials in some of these outlets.

In 2007 he published his second book From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession...
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