Vijay Govindarajan

Vijay Govindarajan's Key Accomplishments Include . . .
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 also the faculty co-director for Global Leadership 2020, Tuck's executive education program that focuses on global management and is taught on three continents.

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 new book Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators (Harvard Business School Press).

More About Vijay Govindarajan . . .
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, MIT Sloan Management Review and Journal of Business Strategy. He is a popular keynote speaker and has been featured at such conferences as the Business Week CEO Forum and the Economist Conference.

• Changing the Rules of the Global Game
  

  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?

• Organizational Capabilities for Global Leadership
  

  Securing global presence is anything but synonymous with possessing global competitive advantage. Presence in strategically important markets is certainly a precondition for creating global competitive advantage. To convert global presence into global competitive advantage, the company must pursue three value creation opportunities: adapting to local market differences, exploiting economies of global scale, and maximizing the knowledge transfer across borders. Pursuing these value creation opportunities requires the firm to design the right type of organization (in terms of structure, systems, people, process, and culture), an organization that can simultaneously optimize local responsiveness, global scale, and knowledge transfer.

• Building Breakthrough Businesses Within Established Organizations
  

  Even world-class companies with successful business models eventually hit the ceiling on growth. That's what makes emerging industries so attractive. These markets represent huge opportunities for capturing long term growth and competitive advantage. But because they lack a proven formula for making a profit, they are risky and expensive-with dire consequences for failure. Vijay Govindarajan argues that every organization's survival depends on strategic experiments that target such untested markets, but few firms understand how to implement them successfully. Too many managers think that a great idea is enough to get them from business plan to profitability, but somewhere in the middle of the innovation process, most organizations stumble. Govindarajan reveals where firms go wrong on their journey from idea to execution-and outline exactly what it takes to build a breakthrough business while sustaining excellence in an existing one.

"Vijay is among the world's hottest business gurus"

---Businessweek, Oct. 2006