Kathryn Harrigan

Kathryn Harrigan is the Henry R. Kravis Professor of Business Leadership at Columbia Business School, affiliated with the Management Division. She joined CBS in 1981 and specializes in corporate strategy, strategic alliances, mergers & acquisitions, and turnaround management.

Education: BA from Macalester College (1972), MBA from University of Texas, Austin (1976), and DBA from Harvard (1979). Her research focuses on corporate renewal, technological synergies, and demand-side diversification in industries like telecommunications and media. She has authored prize-winning books and serves on boards of publicly-traded firms.

Research interests include strategic flexibility, private equity-driven turnarounds, and competitive strategies for declining industries. Key articles analyze AT&T’s decline, new conglomerate strategies in the digital era, and the impact of M&A on innovation. Awards include recognition for her books on strategic management.

Teaches courses on corporate growth, turnarounds, and strategy formulation. Her case studies cover companies like Johns Manville, Motorola, and Warner Bros. Discovery. She has contributed to media discussions on corporate restructuring via outlets like The Wall Street Journal and Yahoo Finance.

Labs/teams: Active in Columbia’s strategic management research community, focusing on empirical analyses of corporate governance and joint ventures. Future work explores digital-era conglomerates and innovation dynamics in emerging markets.