Karthik Ramanna

As more equity capital has become passive, boards and audit committees may find fewer market signals of emerging risks to their organizations than they did before. This means that when the risks do become apparent, much damage has already been done and non-executive board members find themselves facing serious repercussions. An important way to avoid this outcome is for boards and audit committees to be more attuned to nascent risks often lurking in their organizations’ financial statements, internal controls, and sustainability reports. In this talk, Karthik Ramanna, Ph.D. draws from his years of scholarship on accounting and auditing processes to offer a crash course on enhancing risk awareness, leaving audiences with a practical checklist for being better stewards of investor and societal interests.

As we enter an age of low trust in leaders in business and government, more is expected of them than ever before. How can leaders earn the trust of skeptics both inside and outside their organizations in order to make long-term decisions that require near-term sacrifices from stakeholders? Drawing on lessons from a wide range of field studies – including entities as diverse as IKEA, Nestle, the U.S. Justice Department and the Vatican Bank, and in places as varied as China, India and Saudi Arabia – Karthik Ramanna, Ph.D., has identified actions leaders take – and the mistakes they sometimes make – as they navigate the trust divide. He guides organizations through such measures as:

• Building a mandate for organizational reform when external stakeholders demand radical change, but internal powerbrokers are tradition-bound.
• Navigating conflicting expectations of global firms in different jurisdictions – for instance, the empowerment of LGBTQ+ employees in countries where this goes against local customs and laws.
• Deciding when and if multinational corporations should legitimately engage in policymaking outside their home jurisdiction.

In this presentation, audiences will learn powerful analytical tools such as bridging capability asymmetries, managing perception gaps, and setting and delivering on legitimate expectations.

Global decarbonization is more urgent than ever, but corporate efforts in this space are muddied by poor performance metrics that allow companies to claim competitors’ and even regional-average results on emissions reduction as their own. According to co-founder of the non-profit E-ledgers Institute, Karthik Ramanna, Ph.D., we need robust carbon-accounting metrics that hold companies responsible for the decarbonization decisions under their control and allow them to demonstrate and be rewarded for excellence in this regard. “To accelerate solutions to climate change,” Ramanna notes, “we need to align our greatest known problem-solving system – the competitive spirit in capitalism – with the goal of global decarbonization. This is what the E-ledgers accounting solution does.” In this talk, Ramanna will outline the E-liability method, sharing case studies of companies in many sectors and geographies that have deployed the approach to gain competitive insights and create win-wins on climate change action.