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).

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.

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Tel : 603-646-2156
VG@dartmouth.edu