The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World by Karthik Ramanna

Amazon.com

A first-of-its-kind look at the outrage gripping organizations worldwide—and how leaders can respond to it.

Outrage is everywhere—on the left and on the right—and many companies have found themselves in the crosshairs. GoFundMe was pressured to cut off funding to protesting truckers in Ottawa. Disney's CEO was dragged down for mishandling both sides of Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law. Facebook and other tech companies have been accused of manipulating elections in many countries and by many parties.

People are angry with the world—in some cases, rightfully so—and now view companies as they do governments, as targets of their wrath and potential forces for social change. Managing outrage has moved from being an occasional leadership challenge, like handling a PR crisis, to a necessary and critical leadership capability, like strategic thinking or financial acumen.

Based on his popular University of Oxford leadership course and case studies on organizations such as IKEA, Nestlé, the Vatican, and others, Karthik Ramanna offers practical steps to make sense of the outrage, work with relevant stakeholders to progress through it, and emerge stronger for it. Ramanna's pragmatic framework, developed through years of experience with organizations, helps leaders "turn down the temperature," analyze root causes, develop and implement responses that are mission-consistent, and build resilience.

The Age of Outrage is an essential guide for leaders and their teams in this new era of polarization.About the author

Karthik Ramanna is Professor of Business & Public Policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and a fellow of St. John’s College.

An expert on business-government relations, sustainable capitalism, and corporate reporting & auditing, Professor Ramanna studies how organizations and leaders build trust with stakeholders. His scholarship has won numerous awards, including the Journal of Accounting & Economics Best Paper Prize, the Harvard Business Review-McKinsey Prize for “groundbreaking management thinking,” and three times the international Case Centre’s prizes for “outstanding case-writing,” dubbed by the Financial Times as “the business school Oscars.”

At Oxford, Professor Ramanna established the Case Centre on Public Leadership and the Transformational Leadership Fellowship, the latter a bespoke, by-invitation program for senior leaders looking to reimagine their public-service impact. In 2022, he co-founded the non-profit E-liability Institute, where he serves as principal investigator, with a mission to drive decarbonisation processes through rigorous GHG accounting. From 2016 to 2023, he was director of Oxford’s Master of Public Policy program that has educated over a thousand public leaders from about 120 countries. From July 2023, Professor Ramanna is on partial public-service leave from Oxford to advise the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, an “auditor of auditors” in global markets.

Previously, he was a professor and the Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School, teaching in both the MBA and senior executive-education programs. He has a doctorate from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He lives in Oxford with his husband, Jon, and they enjoy dinner parties and touring Caravaggios.