Megawatt Ghemawat

12 August 2008 at 1:32 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Five things you didn’t know about Pankaj Ghemawat:

1. He entered Harvard College at age 16 and graduated in three years.

2. He entered Harvard Business School’s PhD program at age 19 and graduated in three years.

3. After a year at McKinsey he was hired by Michael Porter into the HBS strategy group and later became, at age 31, the youngest full professor in HBS history.

4. He has authored or co-authored more than 50 HBS cases.

5. He looked about the same at age 19 as he looks today. (I have seen the photographic evidence).

This was discussed yesterday at an AoM session honoring Pankaj with the BPS Division 2008 Irwin Outstanding Educator Award. Jan Rifkin and Anita McGahan hosted a semi-roast in his honor, at which they revealed that Pankaj’s college nickname was “Megawatt Ghemawat” (the authenticity of this story could not be verified, however). Pankaj explained that he started writing his own cases out of fear, lacking the confidence to teach other people’s cases to demanding Harvard MBAs. Eventually he decided that cases were interesting in themselves and led to new research questions and new answers to old questions.

His website is ghemawat.org. He now lives in Spain where he holds the Anselmo Rubiralta Chair of Strategy and Globalization at the IESE Business School, University of Navarra. He blogs at the HBS Discussion Leader site. His Foreign Policy article “Why the World Isn’t Flat” gained a lot of attention when it appeared last year.