Episode 55: Mohan Sawhney

Mohanbir (Mohan) Sawhney

Prof. Sawhney is the Associate Dean for Digital Innovation at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and is a globally recognized scholar, teacher, consultant and speaker in business innovation, modern marketing, and Artificial Intelligence applications in business.

Prof. Sawhney has written seven management books as well as dozens of influential articles in leading academic journals and managerial publications. His most recent book, The Sentient Enterprise: The Evolution of Business Decision Making, was published in October 2017 and was on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. He has also written a book of poetry called Love, Longing and Loneliness in 2014. His research has been published in leading journals like California Management Review, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Management Science, Marketing Science, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. He is a contributor to Forbes and his articles have been published in Fortune, Financial Times, CIO Magazine and TheHill.com.

Prof. Sawhney is a pioneer in online executive education. He has created 8 successful SPOCs (Small Online Private Courses), including Digital Marketing Strategies, Product Strategy, AI Applications for Growth, Influencer Marketing Strategy, and the Kellogg Chief Product Officer Program. These online courses have enrolled over 15,000 students from December 2018 to February 2023. He has also co-authored simulation games like DigiStrat (2021), CloudStrat (2020) and PhotoWars. He has authored over 30 case studies. In 2021, he was ranked by the Case Center as 23rd in the list of top academic case writers in the world. He has won several awards for his teaching and research, including the 2006 Sidney Levy Award for Teaching Excellence at the Kellogg School, the 2005 runner-up for Best Paper in Journal of Interactive Marketing, the 2001 Accenture Award for the best paper published in California Management Review in 2000 and the Outstanding Professor of the Year at Kellogg in 1998. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta in 2011and the Global Alumni Recognition Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2021.

Prof. Sawhney advises and speaks to Global 2000 firms and governments worldwide. His speaking and consulting clients include Accenture, Adobe Systems, AT&T, Boeing, Cisco Systems, Dell, Entergy, Ericsson, Fidelity Investments, General Mills, Google, Honeywell, Intuit, Jenner & Block, Jones Lang LaSalle, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg Company, KPMG, McDonald's, Meta, Merck, Microsoft, Raytheon Missile Systems, Red Hat, Rockwell Automation, Roche, SAP, Salesforce, Smartsheet, Sony, Teradata and Textron Inc. He serves on the Board of Directors at Reliance Jio Infocomm. He also serves on the advisory boards of several technology startups, including Course5 Intelligence, LawGeex, MommyDaddyMe, Octi, PomVom, QualSights, Sprinklr, StartupWind, Vistalytics and vMock. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Study for Business Markets (ISBM) at Penn State University and a member of the Advisory Board at Chicago Innovation.

Prof. Sawhney holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta; and a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.