Sumantra Ghoshal Organisational Theory

Sumantra Ghoshal

Sumantra Ghoshal was a renowned academician and management guru.

Biography

Sumantra Ghoshal was born in 1948 in Calcutta (Now called Kolkata). Sumantra Ghoshal started his career with prestigious state owned enterprise Indian Oil Corporation, after graduating from Delhi University with majors in Physics, where he rose through the management ranks before moving to United States on Fulbright Fellowship in 1981. He has a distinction of producing two PhD dissertations simultaneously at MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School. Ghoshal has also been awarded a S.M. from MIT Sloan School of Management and D.B.A. degree from Harvard Business School in 1983 and 1986 respectively.

In 1985, he joined INSEAD Business

He first impressed through a seminal critique of the widely used matrix form of organisational structure which managers report in two directions – along both functional and geographic lines. The article argued that the dual reporting leads to ‘conflict and confusion’ in large multinationals, which are separated by barriers of distance, language, time, culture and a lot of other factors which makes it nearly impossible for all managers to clarify the confusion and resolve the conflicts.

This theory was authored by both Bartlett and Ghoshal and both of them argued that the companies need to alter their organisational psychology (their shared norms and beliefs) and their physiology (the systems that allow information to flow around the organisation) before they start to redesign their anatomy (the reporting lines). Their work set off a search for new metaphors for organisational structures, borrowing in particular from psychology and biology—for example, the corporate DNA and the left brain of the

‘Imagine the heat,’ he would say, ‘the humidity, the noise, the dirt’. It sucks up all your energy, drains your brain, and exhausts your imagination. And then he would take them to the forest of Fontainebleau, near INSEAD, where he was a professor at that time, and pointed to ‘the smell of the trees, the crispness in the air, the flowers, and the grass underfoot’. How one's heart lifts up, how the energy and creativity bubble away. You can tell that whether a business is Calcutta or Fontainebleau by going through the door of that business. He inspired his audience by saying that ‘A manager's task is to create a working environment that is like Fontainebleau, not Calcutta’.

Shortly before he died, Ghoshal wrote one of his most contentious papers, in which he suggested that much of the blame for corporate corruption in the early 2000s could be laid at the feet of business schools and the way they try to teach management as a science. Such a method has no room for morality. Thus, argued Ghoshal, “Business schools have actively freed their students from any sense of moral