Robert Kaplan

Robert S. Kaplan is Senior Fellow and Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. He joined the HBS faculty in 1984 after spending 16 years on the faculty of the business school at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he served as Dean from 1977 to 1983. Kaplan has co-developed both activity-based costing (ABC) and the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), widely recognized as seminal contributions to management theory and practice. His current research applies these innovations to important problems at the intersection of business and society, including collaborative work with Michael Porter on value-based health care, with Karthik Ramanna on accounting for corporate GHG emissions and societal impact, and with Palladium on extending the Balanced Scorecard strategy execution system to inclusive growth strategies that deliver triple bottom line performance. Kaplan has authored or co-authored 14 books and more than 200 papers, including three dozen in Harvard Business Review. He received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T., a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University, and honorary doctorates from four international universities. He received the Outstanding Accounting Educator Award in 1988 from the American Accounting Association and was inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame in 2006.