Ran Charan

Ram Charan is a highly acclaimed business advisor, speaker and author, and has coached some of the world's most successful CEOs. For 35 years, Charan has worked behind the scenes at companies like GE, DuPont, Novartis, Pharmacia, Warner Lambert, Duke Energy, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Schering-Plough, Smith-Kline and Verizon.

Charan started his business career as a teenager working in the family shoe shop in India. He went on to earn an engineering degree and then MBA and doctorate degrees from Harvard Business School.

Ram Charan is a favorite among executive educators. He won the Bell Ringer (best teacher) award at GE's famous Crotonville Institute, and the Best Teacher Award at Wharton and Northwestern. He was among Business Week's top ten resources for in-house executive development programs.

Ram Charan is a well-known author, whose books include Execution, written with Larry Bossidy, the former CEO of Honeywell. Execution reached number one on the Wall Street Journal list, and has been on the New York Time's best-seller list for more than fifty weeks. His other books include What the CEO Wants You to Know, Boards at Work, Profitable Growth, Every Business Is a Growth Business, and Know How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform From Those Who Don't. Ram Charan also tailors his books for specific client companies such as Gateway, Ford and EDS. In one of his newest books, Leaders At All Levels, Ram Charan reveals exactly what's wrong with corporate leadership development and tells how to make it right. He also details how to uncover the hidden leaders in a company, when and where to bring in fresh talent, and how to coach, measure, and reward leadership. In his other new book, What the Customer Wants You to Know, Ram Charan defines a new approach to selling- which he calls value creation selling- and explains how the salesforce can partner with clients and deliver value to the customer.

His book Boards that Deliver: Advancing Corporate Governance From Compliance to Competitive Advantage, gives useful tools and techniques to take boards and their companies to a higher level of performance. His previous book, Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right, is based on a simple concept, showing that many companies approach strategy and execution in a surprisingly unreal manner and even the simplest of measurement methods, like the business model, are not applied correctly.

Ram Charan has written articles for the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Time, Information Week, Leader to Leader, Director's Monthly, Directorship, The Corporate Board and USA Today. Ram Charan is a director of Austin Industries and The Six Sigma Academy. He was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources.

Charan serves as a co-host for the Fortune Forum on Corporate Governance and also serves on the National Association of Corporate Directors' Blue Ribbon Commission on Corporate Governance. Currently, he is a new director of two companies, TYCO Electronics and EMAAAR/MGF, a company in the hospitality and real estate arena. He is based in Dallas, Texas.