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.
ESG & Corporate Governance
Addressing Climate Change Must Begin with Verifiable Carbon Accounting
Robert Kaplan and Karthik Ramanna propose a new approach for verifiable accounting on indirect corporate emissions that would apply to all corporations,...
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Antitrust and Competition
Startup Acquisitions Have Undecided Effects on Innovation and Economic Growth
Startups are a major driver of innovation, but many startups are acquired by large incumbents. Do these acquisitions stifle innovation or promote...
ESG & Corporate Governance
History Shows that Voluntary ESG Standards Lead to a More Focused ESG Disclosure
In recent years, ESG reports have become more common for publicly traded companies. However, critics have found the information they provide to...
Regulation
Letters that Matter: How Interest Groups Shape Financial Legislation
Members of Congress are inundated with an avalanche of correspondence on a daily basis. But what persuades them to heed the call?...
Labor
Are There Really Gender Pay Differences in the CEO Labor Market?
The gender pay gap is a well-documented phenomenon in global labor markets, but this gap does not seem to apply to the...
Monetary Policy
How Many Banks Are at Risk of Insolvency Right Now?
Given the recent banking turmoil and failure of SVB and Signature and issues in First Republic, it is important to understand the...
Misinformation
The Challenges of Regulating Disinformation
In response to rising concerns about political disinformation, governments have introduced a slew of interventions. Federico Vaccari warns in new research that...
Development
India’s Evolving Industrial Policy Is Critical for Realizing Its Development Vision
Industrial policy was once so out of fashion that it was jokingly called “the policy that shall not be named.” Now it’s...