Ram Charan

Biography

Active advisor to CEOs of Fortune 100 companies and emerging venture capital funded firms Ram Charan specializes in converting vision into reality and action. Expert in executing strategies for bottom line results, he coaches CEO’s and other leaders on achieving profitable top line growth that is also capital efficient.

Business Week named him the number two resource for in-house corporate executive development programs in the U.S. Formerly on the faculty at Harvard Business School and Northwestern University, he has won Best Teacher awards at Northwestern, G.E. and the 1997 Best Teacher Award at the Wharton School’s Life Insurance Institute.

He is the author of Boards at Work; lead co-author of Every Business is a Growth Business and Business Acumen, a customized book for Ford Motor Company.

Publications

OWNING UP: The 14 Questions Every Boad Member Needs to Ask Your world as a director has suddenly changed. You've seen members of other boards take the heat when their companies imploded. The managements of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Washington Mutual clearly failed, but so did their boards. Now the board of every company beset with problems is coming under scrutiny.

The pressure is on. Your board must own up to its accountability for the performance of the corporation. Governance now means leadership.

Boards must change their modus operandi to address the new and complex issues that are emerging. These include

Ensuring liquidity in the context of the global financial crisis Setting CEO performance targets in a very uncertain economy Assessing strategy and enterprise risk under extreme volatility So what should boards do now? What should they be talking about in their meetings and executive sessions? What decisions must they make? How assertive must they be regarding company priorities and operating goals?

In Owning Up, business advisor and corporate governance expert Ram Charan answers these and other burning questions on the minds of directors and business leaders. He describes best practices that are emerging in boardrooms he has observed firsthand. And he provides practical recommendations on a range of issues, from compensation to dealing with external constituencies. Wisely attuned to the human side, he confronts the need for some boards to refresh their composition and for others to rebalance their board dynamics.

Directors, CEOs, general counsels, and operating executives will find here the guidance they need to meet the new and rising standards for corporate governance in this demanding business environment.

Titles

Innovation and Growth: Cultivating The Game-Changers
Companies need innovation for revenue and profit growth. But many people think innovation is unpredictable or out of reach. Ram Charan demystifies innovation and explains how powerhouses Procter & Gamble, Nokia, LEGO and Honeywell do it. With his penchant for real-world practicality, he translates insights from the best companies into concrete steps that make innovation repeatable and measurable. This session, based on Charan’s 2008 book The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation, covers the following:

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
For many leaders, creating a strategy is the easy part. Making it happen is the bigger challenge. Why is flawless execution so hard to achieve? Because few leaders understand what it requires. This presentation shows how to get the job done and deliver results . . . whether you’re running an entire company or in your first management job. Ram explores what "execution" really means, and how it brings together the critical elements of any organization -- its people, strategies, and operations. Execution takes personal discipline, and more important, a systematic approach to synchronizing the moving parts of the organization. Based on the best selling and highly praised book Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done this is practical, insightful, leading-edge business thinking for organizations that want to do things differently.

Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right
The fundamentals of how a business makes money are being rapidly and permanently altered by sweeping structural changes. With his extraordinary depth and breadth of experience, Ram Charan is the ideal guide for everyone -- entrepreneur, mid-level manager, or CEO -- about what is to be done so you can get things right in this challenging, radically changed world. He starts by showing you how to understand the most fundamental element of any business: whether you can realistically make the money you hope to in the game you’re playing. He then shows how to use the business model to develop a robust, reality-based process for thinking about the specifics of your business in a holistic way. He shows how to tie together the financial targets you must meet, the external realities you face, and internal activities such as strategy development, operating tactics, and selection and development of people.