Pankaj Ghemawat received his Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics and his Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University. Entering Harvard College at the age of 16, he was accepted to Harvard Business School’s Ph.D. program at 19, graduating three years later.

After a stint at McKinsey & Company, he spent 25 years on the full-time faculty at Harvard Business School, where, in 1991, he was appointed the youngest full professor in the school’s history. Since 2006, Ghemawat has been the Anselmo Rubiralta Professor of Global Strategy at IESE Business School in Barcelona.

Pankaj Ghemawat is actively involved in attempts to globalize management through formal leadership development activities. He and Jordan Siegel will publish a text-and-cases book on global strategy with Harvard Business School Press in 2010. Ghemawat is also a member of the task force on the Globalization of Management Education appointed by the AACSB, the U.S.-based accreditation body for business schools. And he is developing a cross-functional module on globalization for the first-year of the MBA program at IESE Business School. Ghemawat also works actively with companies to help them globalize their leadership development programs.

Pankaj Ghemawat’s books include Commitment (Free Press, 1991), Games Businesses Play (MIT Press, 1998), Strategy and the Business Landscape (Pearson Prentice Hall, 3rd edition, 2009), the award-winning Redefining Global Strategy (Harvard Business School Press, 2007). It continues to receive international acclaim.

He is also the author of more than 100 research articles and case studies, and ranks as one of the world’s best-selling authors of teaching cases.

On the research side, Ghemawat also served as:

2009

• Conference Keynote Speech at the Strategic Management Society on “The Future of Globalization” (October)
• Conference Keynote Panel at the Academy of International Business on “Is the World Flat or Spiky?” (June)

2008

• Irwin Award for the Educator of the Year from the Business Policy and Strategy Division of the Academy of Management
• IESE-Fundación BBVA Economics for Management Prize
• Elected fellow of the Strategic Management Society

2006-2007

• McKinsey Award for best article published in Harvard Business Review
• Elected fellow of the Academy of International Business

Prof. Ghemawat argues that the world today is not as “globalized” as many strategists believe, and that cross-border differences still matter in the world economy.

His view contrasts significantly with many other economists such as Thomas L. Friedman. In a 2007 Foreign Policy magazine article, Prof. Ghemawat argued that 90 percent of the world's phone calls, Web traffic, and investments are local, suggesting that Friedman grossly exaggerated the significance of the trends he described in The World is Flat: "Despite talk of a new, wired world where information, ideas, money, and people can move around the planet faster than ever before, just a fraction of what we consider globalization actually exists".

Prof. Ghemawat argues that in a world that is neither truly global nor truly local, companies must find ways to manage differences and similarities within and across regions. In his book, Redefining Global Strategies, he explains how firms can grow optimally through adaptation (adjusting to differences), aggregation (overcoming differences) and arbitrage (exploiting differences).

“Pankaj Ghemawat is one of those rare individuals who combines world class scholarship with a deep knowledge of business practice. Redefining Global Strategy tackles the crucial balance between local and global that will often define success in an increasingly globalized world economy.” (Michael E. Porter, C. Roland Christensen University Professor, Harvard Business School).