Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School (HBS), where he has sought for two decades to study the drivers of entrepreneurship in emerging markets as a means of economic and social development. At HBS since 1993, after obtaining degrees from Princeton and Harvard, he has taught courses on strategy, corporate governance and international business to MBA and Ph.D. students and senior executives. For many years, he has served as the Faculty Chair for HBS activities in India and South Asia. He was named the first director of the university-wide The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard in the fall of 2010.

Outside HBS, he serves on numerous for-profit and not-for-profit boards in the US and India, including AES, a Washington DC headquartered global power company, and India-based Bharat Financial Inclusion Limited (BFIL), one of the world’s largest firms dedicated to financial inclusion for the poor.  He is a co-founder of several entrepreneurial ventures in the developing world, spanning India, China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Recently, he co-founded Axilor, a vibrant incubator in Bangalore. In 2015, he was appointed a Trustee of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. He has recently published the book - Trust: Creating the foundations for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries. In our conversation we spoke about how we can learn from some of the thinking in Strategy to inform how we think about our careers. We then get into discussing the book and explore what he means when he says the entrepreneurs in developing economies should create the conditions to create. We talk about what that means in terms of Leadership and how one could go about measuring Trust that is being built in the system.

This conversation is likely to be relevant to Entrepreneurs, Investors, CEOs and Advisors in the Start-up ecosystem in India and other developing economies.

Published in Dec 2018.