Subramanian Rangan
Professor of Strategy and Management
The Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court Endowed Chair in Societal Progress
PhD in Management
A PhD is a license to learn
Subramanian Rangan
The first great thing about this job is learning – learning all the time. And the other great thing is that you get to choose what you work on. You get to understand why things happen in the world the way they do: how invisible systems influence people’s lives, how to make sense of global capitalism. And of course, we help leaders in firms to comprehend all this so that they can make the right choices and mobilise their people to enact those choices.
One could call it the macro-micro picture. Macro is the invisible forces and ideas – technological, political, economic and social, for example green issues. Eventually, they have to be processed through leaders in organisations at the micro level. That’s what I love to study.
For nearly a century now, we’ve developed theories of performance. We understand the division of labour, productivity, innovation, competitive advantage, etc. We don’t yet have good theories of progress. But we do know that it’s not enough to say ‘performance is for companies, progress is for governments’.
I’ve been studying global strategy for more than two decades. One of the issues that fascinates me is how we end up with these strong, enduring group identities like national culture. What does it mean to be Chinese, as opposed to a human being? If you’re a foreign firm, you have to understand how such group identities influence the manner in which you’re going to be perceived, trusted, distrusted… and potentially discriminated against. If companies focus only on market strategies (which are about innovation) as opposed to non-market strategies (which are about integration), they’ll be in for some bad surprises!