A key member of the Business Administration faculty of Harvard, Srikant Datar is the man who makes Cost Accounting exciting. His book (co-authored with Charles Horngren and George Foster) Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis, is the leading cost accounting textbook. In 1995, his students at Stanford chose him for the Distinguished Teaching Award. In an interview with website iMahal, Srikant defined his interests as “areas of incentives and game theory, productivity measurement, and economics of quality, time-based competition, and modern manufacturing practices such as just-in-time systems.” The course he currently teaches at Harvard deals with strategy implementation. He is on the board of Harvard Business School Interactive.

Srikant brings considerable business experience to his work. He has consulted or done field-work with Boeing, Du Pont, Ford, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, Mellon Bank, Novartis, Solectron, TRW, and VISA. He sits on the Boards of Novartis, and Voyan Technology Inc., a California-based company.

Srikant grew up in Bombay (Mumbai) where he went to Cathedral and John Cannon School . He went on to a B.Sc. at St Xavier’s, and seriously considered taking the competitive exams to join the Indian government. Instead, he enrolled for a Chartered Accounting course that got him interested in business management. From there, he went on to IIM/A where he was a Gold medalist, and then joined the Tata Administrative Service (TAS). While at TAS, he completed his Cost Accounting certification, and looked around for something new and exciting to do…which ended with Srikant and his wife Swati moving to the . He did his PhD at Stanford (and concomitantly got Masters Degrees in Economics and Statistics). He started his academic career at Carnegie Mellon, and then returned to Stanford before joining Harvard Business School .