Negotiation and Organizational Conflict Resolution

Lakshmi Balachandra has taught entrepreneurship and negotiation for over 20 years at universities and companies around the world. She has a PhD in organizational behavior and her research focuses on why investors prefer to invest in certain entrepreneurs over others after viewing their pitch. She has worked on changing the enormous gender gap in venture capital (VC) funding by creating women's VC networks and conferences. She has an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management, where she taught a course she created on using improvisation for leadership for 10 years. Prior to academia, she worked as a venture capital investor at the first women-owned, women-focused fund in the country. Prior to Harvard, she served in the Biden administration as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Commerce, where she wrote the national entrepreneurship strategy. She has written an artificial intelligence (AI) workbook for entrepreneurs and numerous case studies and research papers. She is currently writing a book on charisma.