Will Srikant Datar have a long term as Dean of the Harvard Business School
On January 1, Srikant Datar will take over from Nitin Nohria as the dean of the Harvard Business School (HBS) in Boston.
A year ago, Nohria said he would retire as dean in June 2020. Then, in March this year, HBS announced that due to the “global upheaval and uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Nitin Nohria has agreed to remain as dean…through the end of December.”
Datar is 67-years-old while Nohria is 58. Nohria has been in the dean’s post for 10 years.. A question that arises is whether Datar will stay in the dean’s post only for a few years, to give the HBS board enough time to find a dean for the long term.
Fund raising will be a key part of Datar’s role as dean of HBS, as it is for deans at most colleges in the U.S., especially the private ones. For instance, during his tenure as dean Nohria oversaw a $1.4 billion capital campaign, which included getting funds from the Tatas in India for a Tata Hall on the HBS campus.
In 1977, Datar’s father retired as the head of the Nautical and Engineering College, Mumbai. His dad, he says, took part in India’s struggle for independence from British rule. His mother was a very good tennis player and was involved in politics, including being elected to the legislature which runs Pune City.
Datar attended the Cathedral & John Connon School in Mumbai, from kindergarten to high school. While at the school, he played tennis, cricket and hockey.
Following his dad’s suggestion, Datar wanted to become an officer in the Indian Foreign or Administrative Service. He studied mathematics and economics at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. In 1973, upon graduation with distinction, he found he was ineligible to take the civil service exam since he was under the age limit. So, while waiting, he completed the Chartered Accountant certification, expecting it would help his chances of getting into the civil service.
He then registered for the entrance exam for the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, after reading a newspaper advertisement for its MBA degree program. At IIM, from 1976 to 1978, he found the class preparation, discussion and good teachers gave him a superior education than the lecture based system at St. Xavier’s. He was chair of the IIM Student's Council in his senior year.
It was only after he graduated with a Gold Medal from IIM that Datar “finally decided that I would not seek a career in government,” he told iMahal, an Indian learning and networking community. He joined the Tata Administrative Service, a management cadre for various companies in the Tata Group. He was exposed to many companies in the group including those involved in the manufacture and sales of trucks, electricity generation, hotel management, and the manufacture and sales of soaps and detergents.
“My father was a professor so I guess academics was in my blood,” Datar told iMahal. “To this point, I had done all my studies in India for financial reasons…I was lucky that Stanford admitted me to its Doctoral Program (with full financial aid), the first Indian student to enroll directly from India.”
When he first got to Stanford from Mumbai, he “…was really struck by the informality of the academic environment in the US. For example, professors and students often put their legs on the table during seminars!…to be as comfortable physically … [when] engag[ng] in often spirited intellectual debates. Everyone called each other by their first names,” he told iMahal. Datar earned a master’s degrees in statistics (1983) and economics (1984) and a Ph.D. in business (1985), all from Stanford University.
Datar will become the 11th dean in HBS’ 112-year history. He has consulted and done field-based research with several companies including Boeing, Du Pont, Ford, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, Mellon Bank, Novartis, Solectron, TRW, and VISA.
He currently serves on the boards of ICF International, Novartis AG, Stryker Corporation, and T-Mobile US. He also serves on the governing body of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.
Asked what advice he has for a student interested in both engineering and business, Datar said “I would recommend an engineering degree over a business degree at the undergraduate level. I would probably reverse that order at the masters' level, voting for business over engineering… Such a combination builds strengths in both technical and business issues.”
Since joining the HBS faculty in 1996, Datar has held a series of key positions, as the School’s senior associate dean responsible for faculty recruiting, faculty development, executive education, research, and currently for university affairs. He has served since 2015 as faculty chair of the Harvard Innovation Labs, or i-lab. He has developed new courses on “Developing Mindsets for Innovative Problem Solving” and “Managing with Data Science,” both of which have included students from other Harvard Schools as well as HBS.
Earlier from 1984 to 1989, he taught at the Carnegie Mellon Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Pittsburgh. From 1989 to 1996, he taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Both at Carnegie and Stanford he was recognized with distinguished teaching awards.
Datar is a co-author of the leading cost accounting textbook, Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis. The book had been written by Charles Horngren of Stanford in 1962. The book revolutionized the field because of its emphasis on management relevance rather than accounting procedures. “I had the pleasure of studying from the book in 1978 while I was a student at the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, India,” Datar told iMahal.
He is also the co-author of Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads. He has published his research on activity-based management, quality, productivity, time-based competition, new product development, bottleneck management, incentives and performance evaluation in The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, Contemporary Accounting Research, and Management Science. He has served on the editorial board of several journals and presented his research to academic and executives audiences in North America, South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Nitin Nohria, whom Datar replaces, will return to teaching at HBS. He has been on the faculty since 1988, teaching courses on leadership and organizational behavior. In 1984, Nohria earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. In 1988, Nohria received a Ph.D. in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.
Founded in 1908, HBS is located on a 40-acre campus in Boston. Its faculty of more than 200 offer full-time programs leading to the M.B.A. and doctoral degrees, as well as more than 70 open-enrollment executive-education programs and 55 custom programs, and Harvard Business School Online, the digital-learning platform.