Professor Mihir A. Desai, Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School and a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School

Mihir A. Desai is the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School and a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He received his Ph. D. in political economy from Harvard University; his MBA as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School; and a bachelor’s degree in history and economics from Brown University. In 1994, he was a Fulbright Scholar to India.

Professor Desai’s areas of expertise include tax policy, international finance, and corporate finance. His academic publications have appeared in leading economics, finance, and law journals. His work has emphasized the appropriate design of tax policy in a globalized setting, the links between corporate governance and taxation, and the internal capital markets of multinational firms. His research has been cited in The Economist, BusinessWeek, The New York Times, and several other publications. He is a Research Associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Public Economics and Corporate Finance Programs, and served as the co-director of the NBER’s India program.

His general interest publications include opinion pieces on varied topics, including tax policy and the effects of globalization on domestic welfare, in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Tax Notes and The New York Times. He has also written for practitioners in the Harvard Business Review on the role of the Global CFO, on how to reform the U.S. tax system, and how changing incentive systems have contributed to the degradation of American competitiveness. He has testified several times to Congressional bodies, including most recently to the Senate Finance Committee on corporate tax reform and inversions.

Professor Desai has taught extensively as an award-winning teacher at HBS and at Harvard University. As a second-year professor teaching finance in the required curriculum, he received the Student Association Award for teaching excellence from the HBS Class of 2001. He subsequently built a second-year elective on International Financial Management, and his many cases on international finance are collected in a casebook published by John Wiley and are taught around the world. Since 1999, he has co-taught Public Economics (EC 1410) at Harvard College. He has also taught seminars and classes on tax policy at Harvard Law School, NYU Law School, and Columbia Law School. Most recently, Professor Desai has been active in delivering various executive education programs at HBS, including the General Managers Program (GMP), on campus and around the world. In 2011, Professor Desai launched, with Professor Joe Lassiter, the first offering at HBS for Harvard undergraduates, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, that is also included as part of the General Education curriculum at Harvard College. In the fall of 2014, Professor Desai began teaching Taxation at Harvard Law School.

His professional experiences include working at CS First Boston (1989-1991), McKinsey & Co. (1992), and advising a number of firms and governmental organizations. He is also on the Advisory Board of the International Tax Policy Forum and the Centre for Business Taxation at Oxford University.

 

Alex Lazarus, Behaviour Change Scientist and Executive Coach, Lazarus & Maverick

Alex Lazarus, Managing Director, is an Award-Winning Marketer, Leadership and Executive Coach, Facilitator and Change Agent. She completed MSc in Coaching & Behaviour Change from Henley Business School and The University of Cambridge certification for psychological testing. She is also certified in NLP, Lumina Spark | Select | Leader | Sales | Emotion Psychometrics. Prior to working as a coach, Alex held senior management roles including Marketing Director for Walt Disney Company. She credits Richard Branson, her ex-employer, amongst others, for inspiring her to stay curious, human and agile. Since she left the corporate world and took on a mission to launch people – not products – into success, she has worked with thousands of people in the UK and abroad.

 

Professor Richard Jolly, Adjunct Professor of Management & Organizations at Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management and Guest Lecturer of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School 

For the past 21 years, Richard has been a Director of the consulting firm, Stokes & Jolly Ltd, with offices in the UK and, recently, the US.

He coaches senior leaders; facilitates senior group processes; delivers keynote addresses; runs senior development programs; and works on a diverse set of consulting assignments.

His clients are located in a broad range of geographies and industries, and he has consulted with leading companies in 41 countries. His main focus is working with professional services firms, creative industries, banks and private equity firms on external projects around more effective client relationships and internal projects around strategy, leadership, resilience, organizational change and succession management.

As well as having recently joined the faculty at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, Richard has been a core faculty member at the London Business School (LBS) for the past 20 years during which time he has consistently been one of its highest rated, most innovative and award-winning teachers. He has taught at Columbia Business School for 13 years and over 20 other business schools around the world.

He has taught core organizational behavior and leadership courses, electives on organizational change, power and politics, and inter-personal dynamics as well as on all the flagship Executive Education open programs and custom programs for more than 75 LBS global clients in the UK and across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, focusing on leadership, organizational change, culture, power and politics, team dynamics and building resilience.

Richard has also been identified as one of the most entrepreneurial course creators having created two, highly successful electives (‘Paths to Power’ and ‘Inter-Personal Dynamics’); student field trips to Lima, Peru and Mexico City; and the London Core Application Practicum consulting program for technology, media and telecoms, and government, healthcare and the third sector. He has also designed, launched and co-directed two Executive Education open programs, ‘Professional Services: Strategic Client Relationships’ and ‘Leading Change’.