Vijay Govindarajan

Vijay Govindarajan, known as VG, is the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School and founding director of Tuck's Center for Global Leadership. He is the faculty co-director for Global Leadership 2020, Tuck's executive education program that focuses on global management and is taught on three continents. Additionally, Govindarajan is also the 2009 Professor-in-Residence and Chief Innovation Consultant for General Electric.

For 25 years, Govindarajan has been advancing the field of strategy execution and advising senior executives in all industries on how to modify their organizations to achieve their strategic ambitions. Reading the zeitgeist of the past three decades, Govindarajan has helped companies adapt to the global business environment and change the way they look at strategy. In the 1980s, he surveyed hundreds of executives at Fortune 500 corporations about their varied approaches to executing strategy across business units. In the 1990s, he helped companies that were expanding globally achieve the most effective balance of differentiation and integration among country subsidiaries. Since 2000, Govindarajan has focused on teaching corporations to build breakthrough businesses while simultaneously sustaining excellence in their core business––the subject of his book Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators (Harvard Business School Press).

Companies he has advised include AT&T, Boeing, British Telecom, Corning, Ford, The Gap, Hewlett-Packard, The Home Depot, IBM, J.P. Morgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, New York Times, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Sony, and Wal-Mart.

Govindarajan is recognized as one of today’s leading business strategists. He has been named to a series of lists by influential publications, including: “Outstanding Faculty” in BusinessWeek’s annual Guide to Best B-Schools; “Top Five Most Respected Executive Coaches on Strategy” by Forbes; “Top Ten Professor in Corporate Executive Education” by BusinessWeek; and “Eight Leading Executive Advisors” by the Wall Street Journal Online. Additional accolades include Across the Board, which features Govindarajan as one of four “superstar” management thinkers from India.

Govindarajan currently writes a column for FastCompany.com. His articles have also appeared in journals such as Harvard Business Review, strategy+ business, California Management Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Decision Sciences, and Journal of Business Strategy. As well, one of his papers was recognized as one of the ten most-often cited articles in the entire 40-year history of Academy of Management Journal. Govindarajan has published six books, including The Quest for Global Dominance (Jossey-Bass, 2001). He is a popular keynote speaker and has been featured at such conferences as the Business Week CEO Forum and the Economist Conference.

Prior to joining the faculty at Tuck, Govindarajan was on the faculties of The Ohio State University and the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad, India). He has also served as a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France), the International University of Japan (Urasa, Japan), and Helsinki School of Economics (Helsinki, Finland). Govindarajan received his doctorate and his MBA with distinction from the Harvard Business School. Prior to this, he received his Chartered Accountancy degree in India. He was awarded the President's Gold Medal for his outstanding performance in obtaining the first rank.

• The Inside Innovation Workshop

  Inside Innovation is a one or two day workshop with co-author Chris Trimble based on the parable "How Stella Saved the Farm". The simple story about a farm in trouble and how it got out of trouble delivers the most fundamental principles about innovation that we have described in our other works, such as The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge. Designed to be energizing, participative, and interactive, the workshop reinforces the insights embedded in Stella and also leads teams through the process of applying these insights to their own innovation endeavors. The workshop can be delivered by expert trainers or you can send your own internal instructors to "train the trainer" events held 3-4 times per year in Washington, DC.

• Changing the Rules of the Global Game

  VG customizes his presentation on Changing the Rules of the Global Game to fit a given audience and situation.
  
  We now live in an era of constant change, driven by the dynamic forces of technology, globalization, the Internet, changing demographics, and shifting customer preferences. As a result, companies find that their strategies need almost constant redefinition—either because the old assumptions are no longer valid, or because the previous strategy has been imitated and neutralized by competitors. Rooted in these premises, the strategic and organizational challenges become:
  
  How do we identify the market discontinuities that could transform our industry? How can we create new growth platforms that exploit new market realities? What are our core competencies and how can we leverage them to generate growth? What new core competencies do we need to build? What organizational DNA will allow us to anticipate and respond to changes on a continual basis?
  
  How do we execute breakthrough strategies?

• Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators - From Idea to Execution

  Many business leaders know that they must innovate to spark and sustain growth. They have to be more entrepreneurial; they must start a new enterprise from within their existing business. But how?
  
  The key is to shift the focus from ideas to execution, and from leadership excellence to organizational excellence. For you to help do this, you have to escape the three boxes that inhibit experimental business: 1) the past —you must forget some of what to this point has made your company successful; 2) the present —you must borrow some of your company's existing resources; and 3) the future —you must learn as you proceed.
  
  Ten Rules offers detailed advice on how to make a risky new business endeavor work within an established and successful corporation. Vijay Govindarajan will demonstrate how an organization's capacity for innovation is actually the product, not the sum, of creativity and execution.

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  April 2012

  Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere

  Reverse Innovation introduces the idea of developing in emerging markets first - instead of scaling down rich world products - to unlock a world of opportunities for your business. Written by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and stemming from a pivotal article in Harvard Business Review, the book offers an important next step for companies looking to derive long-term value from emerging market.

  
  
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  September 2010

  The Other Side of Innovation

  When companies launch innovation initiatives, they typically allot almost all of their time and energy on that initial one percent — the thrilling hunt for the breakthrough idea. But the much ballyhooed burst of inspiration … is merely a starting point. The real innovation challenge lies beyond the idea. It lies in a long, hard journey — from imagination to impact. For ten years, Govindarajan and Trimble have studied one critical question, one that vexes even the best managed corporations: What are the best practices for executing an innovation initiative? Drawing on examples from innovators the authors show how to avoid...how to build...and how to ensure that the most common poisonous myths about innovation, build the right team for any initiative, and ensure you learn quickly from experience as the initiative moves on.

  
  
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  November 2008

  Strategic Cost Management

  With persuasive evidence, Shank and Govindarajan demonstrate the strategic power of value chain analysis, i.e., linking external value creating activities all the way from basic raw materials, to component suppliers, and through to the ultimate end-use product delivered to the consumers. Next, they examine how cost management and cost control must be differentiated depending on the strategic positioning chosen by the firm, be it cost leadership or product differentiation. Finally, the authors offer penetrating in-sights on cost driver analysis using such examples as Champion International and Motorola to describe the uses and limitations of activity-based costing, quality costing, and technology costing.

  
  
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  March 2008

  The Quest for Global Dominance: Transforming Global Presence into Global Competitive Advantage

  Anil K. Gupta, Vijay Govindarajan, and Haiyan Wang are among the most distinguished experts in the field of globalization. In The Quest for Global Dominance they present the lessons from their twenty-year study of over two hundred corporations.

  
  
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  October 2005

  Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators

  By burying their titular 10 rules in a small final chapter, Govindarajan and Trimble commit the first deadly sin of business writing: ambiguity. Before that, readers can be forgiven for believing there are only three fundamental principles for stewarding innovative projects within established companies: forgetting, borrowing and learning. The Fast Company columnists, who cofounded a leadership institute at Dartmouth's business school, argue that most companies do not understand how to foster a genuinely experimental environment. Judging the new company ("NewCo") by the performance standards of the core company ("CoreCo") won't inspire change, hence the need to forget. But NewCo does have to borrow selectively from CoreCo's best resources in order to gain the foothold necessary for success, and it must learn from its experiences rather than stick blindly to its earliest plans. Govindarajan and Trimble use case studies from four industries, including manufacturing and online media. The examples, supplemented by numerous figures that reduce ideas to clear bullet points, get their points across effectively, but some readers may grow impatient waiting for the promised rules to turn up.

  
  
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  June 2003

  Management Control Systems

  Management Control Systems builds on strengths from prior editions by offering a rich diversity of cases balanced with current material. The primary market for Management Control Systems is an MBA level elective in control systems. The text may also be appropriate for advanced managerial accounting courses and/or MBA-level cost accounting courses with an emphasis on management control. Management Control Systems is organized to develop insights and analytical skills related to how managers go about designing, implementing, and using planning and control systems to implement strategies.

  
  
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  April 2003

  Global Strategy and the Organization

  In the battle for global dominance, only those organizations that lead the ongoing globalization of their industries will succeed. That’s why students need a strategic framework that they can apply in a global setting.  Each chapter focuses on a specific, action-oriented issue. Reports on the activities of real firms, such as Wal-Mart, Dell Computer, and Canon, provide insights into the challenges associated with globalization and illustrate the author’s findings.

  
  
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  September 2002

  The Many Facets of Leadership

  In The Many Facets of Leadership, more than 40 top leadership experts share their insights on every aspect of leadership in the 21st century. This book brings together new ideas and techniques for leading change, promoting learning and innovation, handling complexity and crisis, overcoming blind spots, managing knowledge workers, coaching tomorrow's leaders, increasing value, retaining customers, and much more.