An influential thinker

Sumantra Ghoshal, who died in London on Wednesday of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 58, was the quintessential representative of his own ideas: creative, and constantly pushing at the borders of established thought.

Long before the phrase 'global and local' became a byword in multinationals, Ghoshal and his co-writer Christopher Bartlett of Harvard Business School wrote about precisely these kinds of emerging challenges, as changing and converging technologies altered the paradigms of global competition.

Ghoshal may not have introduced catchy new terms to the accumulation of modern management jargon, but much of what he and Bartlett wrote in their 1998 classic Managing Across Borders is almost pro forma management practice today. It is no coincidence that Financial Times named it one of the 50 most influential books of the century.

Ghoshal's key contribution to nineties' management thinking was to put the individual and his creativity at the centre of an organisation. In doing so, he challenged much of the powerful management gospel of the day.

He was among the first, for instance, to suggest that Alfred P Sloan's top-down management style, that worked so famously at General Motors, had become irrelevant for the modern corporation because it stifled creativity and initiative.

Sloan's "three Ss" strategy, he wrote succinctly in a 1999 article with Bartlett and Peter Moran, "...were designed for an organisation man who has turned out to be an evolutionary dead end".

Unlike many power gurus of Indian origin, Ghoshal was closely engaged with India and Indian industry. A monument to his infectious energy and enthusiasm stands in Hyderabad in the form of the impressive Indian School of Business (ISB), of which he was founding dean.

Ghoshal played a key role in setting the framework and agenda for this unique global B-school and participated ungrudgingly in the road shows to recruit its first batch of students. It was typical that, when administrative work stifled his creativity, he chose to step away from a prestigious position, handing over the dean's role to Pramath Sinha of McKinsey, one of the founding organisations.

He was also instrumental in introducing Indian case studies in management curricula -"" not just at ISB but at London Business School. The 2001 two-volume compendium "" World Class in India and Managing Radical Change: What Indian Companies Must Do to Become World Class "" co-authored with Gita Piramal and Sudeep Bhudiraja, contain thought-provoking and prescient analyses of Indian industry.

A professor of business policy at INSEAD in 1992 and professor of strategic leadership at the London Business School, and with doctorates from Harvard and MIT, Ghoshal was singularly lacking in the mandatory gravitas that attaches itself to power gurus.

Even as he restlessly challenged ideas and notions "" often to the point of exasperation of his colleagues "" he was open-hearted about sharing his thoughts. Friends and former co-workers at Indian Oil Corporation, the public sector oil giant where he worked for 12 years, say he never lost his earthy Bengali sensibilities and habits "" not least of all the chain-smoking that probably contributed to his early death.

It was fitting, perhaps, that it was from his hometown of Calcutta (now Kolkata) that he partly derived his celebrated 'spring-time theory'. Hot, humid Calcutta, he had said, represented the stultifying atmosphere of the old controlling corporation.

Later, walking through the spectacular forests of Fontainebleau in France, he remembered feeling energised and invigorated, much as he would in an open and dynamic corporate culture. His lesson: that approaches to management can influence culture and create change "" he evocatively called it "the smell of the place".