Nitin was born in Nohar, Rajasthan, India. He graduated from St. Columba's School in New Delhi, India following which he earned a B.Tech in Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai (Class of 1984), and earned a Ph.D. in Management from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Class of 1988).

He is a co-founder of The Smart Manager, indian business & management magazine along with Gita Piramal and Sumantra Ghoshal.

He has served as an advisor and consultant to several large and small companies in different parts of the world. He has been interviewed by ABC, CNN, and NPR, and cited in Business Week, Economist, Financial Times, Fortune, New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.He is working with fellow HBS professor Rakesh Khurana, the World Economic Forum and the Aspen Institute to create a business oath, like the MBA Oath, [1] that might be used globally. In a Harvard Business Review piece published in October 2008, Khurana and Nohria linked the connection between professionalism of a profession and the profession's ability to deliver value to society:

Nohria has taught across the Business School's M.B.A., doctoral, and executive education programs. He is past head of the required first-year "Leadership and Organizational Behavior" course, and he co-directed the team that designed the required first-year course on "Leadership and Corporate Accountability." He recently taught in such executive education programs as "Building a Global Enterprise in India" and the "New CEO Workshop." A dedicated mentor to many HBS doctoral students over the past two decades, he also taught for years in the interfaculty Ph.D. program in organizational behavior and chaired HBS task forces on case writing and course development, as well as the leadership curriculum. Earlier this year, he was one of four instructors from Harvard Schools who co-designed and taught a January term workshop on "Faith and Leadership in a Fragmented World."

Nitin taught at HBS since 1988. He also served as a visiting faculty member at the London Business School in 1996.

On May 4, 2010 President of Harvard University Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust appointed him as the dean of the Harvard Business School. His term began from July 1, 2010. He accepted the offer to become the next Dean of Harvard Business School, effective July 1, 2010.