Kannan Ramaswamy

Kannan Ramaswamy, Ph.D., is the William D. Hacker Chair Professor of Management in the Department of Global Business at Thunderbird School of Global Management. He is world-renowned for his expertise on global strategy, emerging markets including India and South Asia, the energy sector, corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions and global management.  Dr. Ramaswamy has consulted for several U.S. and European multinationals. He is an award-winning executive educator whose teaching and research interests span emerging market multinationals, business groups and corporate diversification, mergers and acquisitions, privatization, and joint ventures.

Dr. Ramaswamy teaches core courses in competitive strategy and an elective course in global strategy in the graduate programs.  His course on Global Strategy has been consistently ranked as the Most Valuable course by alumni for over a decade. He has been voted Most Outstanding Professor by the student body over 15 times in his Thunderbird career.  In addition to teaching in Thunderbirds full-time programs, Dr. Ramaswamy has taught extensively in the schools Executive Education programs. He has participated in programs with multinational companies including American Express, Dow Chemical, General Motors, Mattel, Brasil Telecom, Delta Air Lines, Astellas Pharmaceutical (Japan), LG Electronics (Korea), Ericsson, Motorola, ExxonMobil, Baker Hughes, ONGC (India), Integra (Russia), and SK Corp. (Korea). Dr. Ramaswamy also directs several Thunderbird programs including the program on Globalization: Merging Strategy with Action that deals with global strategy issues, and the Advanced Management Program for Oil and Gas Industry Executives dealing with contemporary issues in oil and gas.

Dr. Ramaswamys research which has appeared in distinguished journals including Strategic Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, Academy of Management Journal, Management International Review, Journal of Management and Journal of Business Research  focuses on a broad range of topics: challenges facing emerging market multinationals, the performance impact of corporate diversi cation; competitive consequences of privatization; the role of strategic t in mergers and acquisitions; and equity vs. operational-control issues in joint ventures. Much of his recent research in these areas has centered on emerging markets. Dr. Ramaswamys work has been featured among the best papers at these prestigious national meetings eight times; his work was chosen best paper twice at the Academy of Management national meetings. As a faculty member at the academic institutions he has served, Dr. Ramaswamy has won numerous awards for research excellence.  He is currently involved in research pertaining to the energy transition, sustainability of supply chains, and the role of corporate social responsibility in emerging markets.  Some of his most recent work in these areas have appeared in the Journal of International Business Studies and the Journal of Business Strategy.

 Dr. Ramaswamy has also served as guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of Operations Management on knowledge offshoring. With Thunderbird professor Andrew Inkpen, Dr. Ramaswamy co-authored the book Global Strategy: Creating and Sustaining Advantage across Borders published by the Oxford University Press. Along with Profs. Michael Moffett and Andrew Inkpen, he has published The Global Oil & Gas Industry, a book on field studies in the oil and gas industry (Pennwell). Dr. Ramaswamy earned a Ph.D. in strategic management from Virginia Tech; an MBA from the University of Madras in India; and a BS in physics from the University of Madras.