Mihir Desai on “How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers”

If you’re not a numbers person, then finance can be intimidating and easy to ignore. But if you want to advance in your career, you’ll need to make smart financial decisions and develop the confidence to clearly communicate those decisions to others.

In “How Finance Works”, Mihir Desai, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of “The Wisdom of Finance”, guides you into the complex but endlessly fascinating world of finance, demystifying it in the process.

About the Author
Mihir A. Desai is the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He received his Ph.D. in political economy from Harvard University; his MBA as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School; and a bachelor’s degree in history and economics from Brown University. In 1994, he was a Fulbright Scholar to India.

Professor Desai’s areas of expertise include tax policy, international finance, and corporate finance. He is a Research Associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Public Economics and Corporate Finance Programs, and served as the co-director of the NBER’s India program. He has testified several times to Congressional bodies on various tax policy questions.

Professor Desai has taught extensively as an award-winning teacher at HBS and at Harvard University. He has taught public economics and entrepreneurship to undergraduates, finance and international finance to MBA students and executives, and tax law and policy to law students. Recently, Professor Desai created an online finance course through the HBX platform titled Leading with Finance. His books include The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return, published in May 2017, and How Finance Works, published in 2019.

His professional experiences include working at CS First Boston, McKinsey & Co., and advising a number of firms and governmental organizations.

The talk is followed by a reception. Doors open at 5:30 pm. The first 100 attendees will receive a copy of the book.