Bringing Down the Temperature During Polarizing Times

Whoever wins the U.S. presidential election in November will be confronted with a country still bitterly divided. Many feel a sense of hopelessness and fear for the future, just as they sear over past injustices. But there are glimmers of solutions that can be effected through transformational leadership. The author, who ran a program at Oxford University that assembled and built “unlikely coalitions” among more than 1,000 current and prospective public leaders from more than 100 countries, offers lessons from two efforts in Nigeria and Brazil to build bridges and reduce political tensions and violence.

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  Karthik Ramanna is a professor of business and public policy at University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and was previously a professor and the Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School. He coauthored the McKinsey Award–winning HBR article “Accounting for Climate Change” (November–December 2021) and is author of The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World. He is cofounder and principal investigator of the E-liability Institute, a global not-for-profit advancing the urgent accounting upgrade needed to drive green innovation.