Meet the Faculty
Pradip Khandwalla
Pradip N. Khandwalla was educated at Bombay University (B.Com.), Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (M.B.A.), and Carnegie-Mellon University (Ph.D.). He is also a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and an honorary member of National HRD Network. His area of specialization is organizational theory and organizational behaviour, with research, teaching, training and consulting interests in the areas of organizational design and management of excellence, innovative turnaround management, management restructuring, effective management of government, public enterprises and strategic organizations, and individual, organizational, and society-level creativity and innovation. He has been a consultant/trainer to a large number of organizations, including the Aditya Birla Group, Alembic, BHEL, Bharat Petroleum, CMC, Cadila Pharma, DFID, Government of India, Grow Talent, Gujarat State Finance Corporation, Hindustan Lever, L&T, Maharashtra State Apex Cooperative Bank, Microsoft, National Thermal Power Corporation, Pfizer, Reliance, Satyam Computers, Shell India, Tata Telecom, TELCO, Torrent, Wockhardt, World Bank, etc. He has coordinated two international conferences.
Professor Khandwalla taught at McGill University, Canada, for several years before returning to India in 1975. Thereafter he was a professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad until his retirement in 2002. He held the L&T Chair in Organizational Behaviour at IIMA from 1985 to 1991. He was the Director of IIMA from 1991 to 1996.
Professor Khandwalla has authored 16 professional books and over 100 papers and articles in Indian and foreign journals. His book, The Design of Organizations, was an international textbook used in nearly 100 management schools round the world. Another book, Fourth Eye: Excellence through Creativity, stimulated the creativity movement in India. His books on the public sector include Excellent Management in the Public Sector, which got the Escorts Award for the best management book of 1990. In Social Development: A New Role for the Organizational Sciences, Professor Khandwalla argued that organizational and management scientists should concentrate their efforts on improving the functioning of a developing country’s strategically important organizations. Organizational Designs for Excellence discussed six different kinds of organizational excellence, namely competitive excellence, institutionalized excellence, rejuvenatory excellence, missionary excellence, versatile excellence, and creative excellence. Innovative Corporate Turnarounds presented data on 65 turnarounds from sickness in support of the superiority of non-surgical, transformational, creative turnarounds. Management Styles was a study of ten archetypal management styles and their defective versions, and analyzed data from 90 Indian corporate organizations bearing on their relative excellence. Revitalizing the State: A Menu of Options, reviewed global innovations in national governance, and presented a number of options for renewing the Indian state. Turnaround Excellence: Insights from 120 Cases won the best management book of the year award for 2001 given by Delhi Management Association. Corporate Creativity: The Winning Edge outlined the processes, techniques, tools, strategies, and organizational designs that can enable any corporate organization to be successfully innovative on a sustained basis. This book was translated into Mandarin Chinese. Lifelong Creativity: An Unending Quest broke new ground in our understanding of the phenomenon of creativity, and in the ways of harnessing it for personal growth. It won the best book of the year award given by Indian Society of Training and Development and INDAL for 2004. In Professor Khandwalla’s book, Management of Corporate Greatness: Blending Goodness with Greed, published in 2008, he identified several paths of exalted striving beyond profit maximization, and ways of blending them with the pursuit of business goals. It got the best book of the year award given by Delhi Management Association and NTPC for 2008. He also authored a monograph on potential innovations in the governance of India’s Union Government and another one on Bihar’s governance for a task force set up by India’s prime minister. His book Transforming Government through New Public Management was published in 2010. It described a large number of innovative tools practiced in various countries for the effective management of government bodies. His most recent book is Creative Society: Prospects for India. In this book, Professor Khandwalla has discussed many ways of transforming a semi-traditional society like India into a vibrant, innovative society.
Professor Khandwalla has authored four books of poems in English (Wild Words, Out, Incarnations, and Intimations). His volume of translations of his poems in English into Gujarati is titled Manthan. He has authored a guide on one-act plays, an award-winning book of translations of 12th century Kannada poems into Gujarati via English, and two books of the translation of Anjali Khandwalla’s short stories from Gujarati into English (Black Rose and Other Stories, and Green Boy and Stories of Other Creators). His translation into Gujarati via English of the poet Rilke’s celebrated Duino Elegies in German was published in 2008. His translation of over 200 offbeat Gujarati poems into English, titled Beyond the Beaten Track, was published in early 2009. This book was distributed to India’s and the world’s leading poets that can read English.
Professor Khandwalla has served on the editorial/advisory boards of several of the world’s leading journals of management and organizational research, including Administrative Science Quarterly (U.S.), Journal of Management (U.S.), Organizational Science (U.S.), Organization Studies (U.K.) and Asian Journal of Management (Singapore). He was Editor of Vikalpa, India, and served as Guest Editor of special issues of International Studies of Management and Organization, U.S.
Professor Khandwalla has served as a member of the board of directors of well over a dozen corporations including NTPC and Bharat Petroleum Corporation, two giant ‘navaratna’ (nine jewels) companies owned by the Government of India, and also on the board of Bank of Baroda, one of the six largest Indian public sector banks. He is currently on the board of Cadila Pharma, GSPC Distribution Networks Limited, the largest city gas distribution company in India, as well as Grow Talent and AKRSP. He is also on the governing council of Academy of Human Resource Development. He has served as a member of the National Renewal Fund, Government of India, and as a trustee, India Brand Equity Fund of Government of India. He was twice a member, Appointments Board of the Government of India for short-listing heads of public sector banks and financial institutions. Earlier, he was a member of the Planning Commission of Gujarat State, and a member of the Science Advisory Committee of the Cabinet, Government of India.
Professor Khandwalla has won many awards, including Ford Foundation Doctoral
Fellowship (U.S.), Seagram Research Award (Canada), four ‘Best Book of the Year’
awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award in the field of HRD given by World HRD Congress, an international body active in over 30 countries, and another Lifetime Achievement Award given by Indian Academy of Management. Several Indian and international Who’s Who carry his biographical entry. IIM Bangalore has instituted an award for best paper in management by a doctoral student in his name. All India Management Association has given him the award for the best article of the year published in Indian Management.
