Organization and Strategy Seminar（2016-03）

Topic：Contextual Intelligence

Speaker: Tarun Khanna,Harvard Business School

Time: Monday, 20 June, 13:30-15:00 pm

Location: Room 109, Guanghua Building 2

Abstract:

I have come to a conclusion that may surprise you: trying to apply management practices uniformly across geographies is a fool's errand. Best practices simply don't travel well across borders. That's because conditions not just of economic development but of institutional maturity, educational norms, language, and culture vary enormously from place to place. Students of managerial practice once thought that their technical knowledge of best manufacturing practices (to take one example) was sufficiently developed that processes simply needed to be tweaked to fit local conditions. More often, it turns out, they have to be reworked quite radically—not because the technology is wrong but because everything around it changes how it will work. There's nothing wrong with the tools we have at our disposal, but their application requires contextual intelligence: the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge and to adapt that knowledge to a context different from the one in which it was acquired. Until we can better develop and apply contextual intelligence, failure rates for cross-border businesses will remain high, what we learn from experiments unfolding around the world will remain limited, and the promise of healthy growth in all parts of the world will remain unfulfilled.

Introduction:

Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School, where he has sought for two decades to study the drivers of entrepreneurship in emerging markets as a means of economic and social development. At HBS since 1993, after obtaining degrees from Princeton and Harvard, he has taught courses on strategy, corporate governance and international business to MBA and Ph.D. students and senior executives. For many years, he has served as the Faculty Chair for HBS activities in India and South Asia.

//www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/tarun-khanna/

Your participation is warmly welcomed!