“THE BEST INSIGHTS COME FROM UNLIKELY INTERSECTIONS.”
I often say that my life’s goal is to have the world’s most confusing resume, and I’m most of the way there. My work connects ideas from political science, management, economics, and many other fields.
Everything I do — from my research and writing to my podcast — is meant to give you:
The insights to see the right thing to do.
The skills to act on those insights successfully.
The courage to do this when it is hard.
About Gautam Mukunda
Gautam Mukunda is an internationally recognized expert in leadership and innovation. He often jokes that his life’s ambition is to have the world’s most confusing resume and that he’s most of the way there. He is a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. He is also the host of Nasdaq’s podcast “World Reimagined” and a columnist at Nasdaq’s World Reimagined. Previously he was a professor at Harvard Business School and a Distinguished Visiting Professor for the Schwarzman Scholarship. He is the author of two books: Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012) and Picking Presidents (University of California Press, forthcoming in 2022). He has published articles in Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, Security Studies, Slate, Fast Company, Parameters, Politics and the Life Sciences, and Systems and Synthetic Biology on leadership, reforming the financial sector, military innovation, network-centric warfare, and the security and economic implications of synthetic biology. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, Economist, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and on All Things Considered. He advises a variety of companies and organizations on leadership and strategy.
Gautam was a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program and Program on Emerging Technologies. He was a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow, an NSF IGERT Fellow, a Next Generation Fellow of The American Assembly, and a Principal Investigator on the National Science Foundation’s Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center grant. He served on The Chief of Naval Operation’s Executive Advisory Panel and as a member of the New England Regional Selection Committee for the White House Fellowship and was a Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership. He was also a Jeopardy Champion.
At MIT, Gautam was the National Science Foundation Synthetic Biology ERC Postdoctoral Fellow resident at MIT’s Center for International Studies. He received his PhD from MIT in political science focusing in International Relations and Security Studies and an AB in Government from Harvard, magna cum laude. Before his academic career he was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he focused on the pharmaceutical sector.
In addition to his current work as an academic, Mukunda was a Founder and Board Member of SVN Med, a medical device company developing cancer diagnostics and therapeutics. He is a member of the board of directors and chair of the Mentorship Committee of The Upakar Foundation, a national non-profit devoted to providing college scholarships to underprivileged students of South Asian descent. He is on the Advisory Board of Bionic Solutions and KITT Bio. He is an Overseer of the Boston Ballet and a member of the Museum Council of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.