Karthik Ramanna is a top authority on corporate financial accounting and auditing. His research and advisory work address two questions on most board agendas: how to lead an organization through deep societal polarization, and how to measure decarbonization with the rigor of financial accounting. "One of the essential elements to any civilization is its capacity to sustain trust," he says. "If we are to find our way out of this deeply polarized time, our leaders must invest anew in the art and science of growing trust."
His book The Age of Outrage expands on his Oxford course "Managing in the Age of Outrage," which more than 1,000 leadership scholars from over 120 countries have taken. Drawing on field studies of organizations as varied as IKEA, Nestle, the U.S. Justice Department and the Vatican Bank, Ramanna offers a practical five-stage framework for making sense of the animosity around them and emerging stronger. "Managing in the age of outrage is different from managing outrage. The latter is simply crisis management," he explains. "The former requires a new way of thinking, because we have to go beyond the proverbial 'fire-fighting' to fire-prevention."
Karthik RamannaProfessor of Business and Public Policy, University of Oxford