2025 Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors: Ravi S. Kudesia, Fox School of Business, Temple University

Ravi S. Kudesia
Fox School of Business, Temple University

“Ravi is an exceptional professor. His Negotiations class impacted me in numerous ways. It transformed me from someone who despised negotiation into someone who relished it, by helping me understand that the basis wasn’t deception, but rather sound research and an appreciation for the inherent variability in how we transact business. Because the majority of class involved live negotiations with classmates, I gained immediate competency that guided me through two actual business negotiations. 

Through fifteen courses and four years of study, this is one of the most useful classes, and one of the professors whose impact I’m most grateful for.” – Melissa Schwarzell, Director of Regulatory Policy and Affairs, American Water

Ravi S. Kudesia, 38, is an Associate Professor of Management at the Fox School of Business at Temple University. Before joining Fox, he was a research fellow at Future Resilient Systems: a think tank established collaboratively by ETH Zürich and the National Research Foundation of Singapore.

Ravi studies how systems meditate; That is, how mindfulness can be interwoven into the fabric of human organizing to help systems better navigate situations of crisis and consequence. His research has appeared in leading journals including Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and he has been interviewed in outlets like the Financial Times, New York Times, and Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Outside the classroom, he regularly teaches mindfulness, including to operators and regulators in the nuclear industry as part of a European Commission project—and is involved in preserving indigenous systems of meditative practice from the Indian subcontinent.

Ravi has received several awards for his reviewing, teaching, and research—including being the inaugural recipient of the Tier 1 Experiential Learning Teaching Award at the Fox School and winning best paper and highly-cited research awards from the Academy of Management and Strategic Management Society. 

BACKGROUND

At current institution since what year? 2018

Education: PhD in Business Administration, Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis

List of MBA courses you currently teach: Negotiation, Power, and Influence

TELL US ABOUT LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when… As a generality, Indian grandfathers aren’t known for being particularly sentimental. But I remember when my grandfather, who was nearing his final days, heard I was going into academia. He gave me a box with hard copies of his research articles. I had no clue what those articles meant in a technical sense, as he was a professor of engineering. But I did know what they meant in a deeper sense. What it means to do research, to conduct inquiry. I’m not sure this is the moment I knew I wanted to be an academic—or that there is any one such moment—but it’s a moment I think back to when I reflect on why I’m doing what I’m doing.

What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it? Something that really concerns me is how in our algorithmic age, our attention span is being collapsed to about the length of a TikTok video and commodified by organizations in the attention economy. In my research, I ask, what if organizations could enhance the quality of human attention, rather than further eroding it? In one ethnographic project, we’re studying an explosive demolitions firm. Because even a single moment of inattention can be fatal—you really don’t want to mindlessly overload the explosive powder or mistakenly enter the blast radius!—the organization has designed an exceptional infrastructure of practices to enhance the attention of its members. But the key takeaway isn’t about how this one organization works. It’s about how organizations of all types can design a practice infrastructure to enhance attention and combat its erosion, even when attention isn’t such a matter of life-and-death.

If I weren’t a business school professor… I wouldn’t have to do all this grading right now!

What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? To paraphrase the famous pragmatic maxim of Charles Sanders Peirce, a concept is only as good as its consequences for action. I’m pretty relentless about making sure everything I teach cashes out in something actionable for students, and I think they appreciate that.

One word that describes my first time teaching: A confirmation—that I was in the right place, doing what I was meant to be doing.

Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor: How much impact even the little things you do can have on a student.

Professor I most admire and why: When I was really struggling to find my way as a scholar during grad school, I happened upon an article written by Karl Weick. It felt almost illegal, like someone had given me cheat codes. It had simply never occurred to me that business professors were allowed to ask questions like “how do people make sense of the world—and what happens when their ability to make sense collapses?” Or that we could look for answers by studying wildland firefighters and aircraft carriers. Or that someone might value how beautifully we write. I’m not the only one who has had this sort of epiphany experience reading his work. It’s almost commonplace, a rite of passage. For generations of professors, he’s expanded our sense of what we’re “allowed” to do in ways that make our work more impactful on the world—to me, that’s a legacy worthy of admiration.

TEACHING MBA STUDENTS

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students? Those moments when a student brings a real-world challenge of theirs into the classroom and—out of interactions with other students’ experiences and the frameworks and principles I teach—some completely new possibility for action emerges and opens up for the student. I love that!

What is most challenging? Power (and its negotiation) is such a rich topic, it’s a real challenge to do justice to the topic in just a semester. Something invariably gets left off the agenda. (Ironically, leaving things off the agenda is itself a manifestation of power.)

In one word, describe your favorite type of student: Curious

In one word, describe your least favorite type of student: Incurious

When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as… A believer in Goodhart’s Law: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM

What are your hobbies? I’ve been playing the drums for just over twenty years—ever since I first picked up sticks and tried to imitate Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa (which is why I still play traditional grip, even though jazz largely eludes me). Also, I don’t know if this counts as a hobby, or if it indicates some sort of compulsion, but amassing a vast collection of books that I may, or may not, ever have enough time to read. (Given how many bookshelves I’ve built to store these books, maybe carpentry is in the cards for a future hobby!).

How will you spend your summer? On Zillow. We’re house hunting!

Favorite place(s) to vacation: There’s something about Nice that’s just undeniable. It’s not hard to see why it inspired Matisse.

Favorite book(s): There’s an eighth century Sanskrit book called the Vijñāna Bhairava that lists some 112 different meditative techniques to radically transform the quality of your consciousness. Only one of these techniques needs to work, and you’re not the same person you were when you first picked up the book.

What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much? I’ve really been enjoying Ghibli Fest over the past few years—it’s a real treat seeing Miyazaki films in theaters!

What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why? The amazing thing about music is how a record can transport you right back to that moment in time when it was the soundtrack to your life. Frank Ocean and that life-changing phone call I got in the Philly airport en route back to Singapore, Led Zeppelin and that feeling of being sixteen and driving around with the windows down wondering if this is what freedom meant, Jasleen Royal and that anticipation, watching the flower girls come out and knowing in a few moments, my wife-to-be would be walking down the aisle. Music is basically a form of time travel.

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS

If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this… As Herbert Simon pointed out long ago, the world of business is not like the world of physics, governed by inviolable and eternal laws. So the work of a business school cannot be to discover how things necessarily are, but rather to envision how they might be. But we sometimes have a hard time with this mandate, for reasons of physics envy or whatever, and I think that holds us back from playing the role we could play in society. I guess I’d like to see business schools of the future doing more to actually envision the future. (Ideally, a better one.)

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at… appreciating the law of unintended consequences when making decisions.

I’m grateful for… the colleagues, mentors, friends, and family who saw potential in me, as a professor and as a person, and challenged me to realize it.

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