Amar Bhidé

Amar Bhidé is Thomas Schmidheiny Professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Previously he was Professor of Business at Columbia University, a former Senior Engagement Manager for McKinsey & Co. and Vice President of E.F. Hutton.

Until March 2023 he was on the the board of Baillie Gifford’s flagship Scottish Mortgage Investment he departed in acrimony, chastising colleagues for a “natural avoidance of difficult questions after things have gone so well for so long”, as the FTSE 100-listed company announced a boardroom shake-up.

Bhidé’s criticisms and the nature of his exit have sent ripples through the cosy world of investment trusts, a £268bn industry that forms a bedrock of pension portfolios. It also highlighted tensions over the direction of one of the UK’s most popular investment vehicles whose share price has halved over the past 18 months.

His book “A Call for Judgment” – Sensible Finance for a Dynamic Economy clearly explains how bad theories and mis-regulation have caused a dangerous divergence between the real economy and finance. In simple language Bhidé takes apart the so-called advances in modern finance, showing how backward-looking, top-down models were used to mass-produce toxic products.

In his previous book “The Venturesome Economy” – How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World, he uses extensive field studies on venture-capital-backed businesses to examine how technology really advances in modern economies.

Amar takes apart the so-called advances in modern finance, showing how backward-looking, top-down models were used to mass-produce toxic products. He offers tough, simple rules: limit banks and all deposit taking institutions to basic lending and nothing else.

The Venturesome Economy won the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in Business, Finance and Management and was in the “Best of 2008” lists of the Economist, BusinessWeek and Barrons. He also authored “The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses” and “Of Politics and Economic Reality.”

Professor Bhidé is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has served on the faculty of Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.

His ten Harvard Business Review articles include “The Judgment Deficit”, “Efficient Markets, Deficient Governance,” “How entrepreneurs craft strategies that work,” “Bootstrap Finance: the Art of Start-ups,” and “Hustle as Strategy.”

He has also written numerous articles in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Forbes, the Financial Times and The LA Times.