Speakers

Phanish Puranam is the Roland Berger Chair Professor of Strategy & Organization Design at INSEAD.

His research in organization science focuses on how organizations work, and how we can make them work better. His current projects focus on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies shape how we organize. Phanish leads the Organizations and Algorithms research program (supported by the Desmarais Fund) at INSEAD which has trained several doctoral students who are themselves now faculty at leading business schools, and which involves collaborators from around the world. He is also co-founder of Ximerai, an AI start-up that is developing new ways to integrate human and machine intelligence to solve strategy and organization design problems.

Phanish’s research has won him several honours, including the Oskar Morgenstern Medal for distinguished academic work in Business, Economics and Statistics, and the Sumantra Ghoshal Award for Rigor and Relevance in Management Research. He received an honorary doctorate (honoris causa) from the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics at the University of Zurich in 2026.

Phanish’s book for researchers “The Microstructure of Organizations” (Oxford University Press, 2018) offers a first principles reimagining of organization design that focuses on aggregation as the central feature of organizations, conceptualized as complex adaptive systems. His books for practitioners include "Corporate Strategy: Tools for analysis and decisions" (co-authored with Bart Vanneste, Cambridge University Press, 2016) which is used to teach strategic management in business schools around the world, and “India Inside” (co-authored with Nirmalya Kumar, Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), which won critical acclaim for its balanced look at the prospect of India emerging as a global hub for innovation. His latest book “re-Humanize: Building human-centric organizations in the age of algorithms” (Penguin Random House, 2024) explores how AI is changing how we organize and is also written for a general audience. 

Phanish is an alumnus of Delhi College of Engineering (1994) and the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (1997). He obtained his Ph.D. at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2001 and was on the faculty of London Business School till 2012. He served there as School Chair Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship, and Co-Director of the Aditya Birla India Centre. Phanish has served as the Academic Director for the Ph.D. Program at both London Business School and INSEAD. He has also held visiting professorships and Distinguished Visitor positions at Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, London Business School, Oxford University, the Indian School of Business, IIM-Ahmedabad, Stanford University, Imperial College London and Singapore Management University.