Managing the Support Staff Identity Crisis
Employees not connected directly to profit and loss can suffer from a collective “I-am-not-strategic” identity crisis. Professor Ranjay Gulati suggests that business managers allow so-called support function employees to become catalysts for change.
Content: Article | Author: Ranjay Gulati | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior
The Outside-In Approach to Customer Service
Is your enterprise resilient or rigid? In this Q&A, HBS professor Ranjay Gulati, an expert on leadership, strategy, and organizational issues in firms, describes how companies can evolve through four levels to become more customer-centric. Plus: book excerpt from Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business.
Content: Article | Authors: Ranjay Gulati, Sarah Jane Gilbert | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subject: Customer Related
Ranjay Gulati
a key distinction for managers to focus on is the one between coordination and cooperation.
Coordination—the ability to work together—involves the alignment of “hard” phenomena: activities, processes, and information. Most companies begin with this and simply assume that mandating shared tasks and information exchange will suffice. It does to a degree but can be severely limiting in how much firms can achieve. At best, they are … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Author: Ranjay Gulati | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subject: Organizational Behavior
The Barista Principle – Starbucks and the Rise of Relational Capital
How did a small Seattle company turn itself into a global synonym for java and joe? The answer, we believe, lies with an ingredient as central to Starbucks’s business as the premium coffee beans it roasts: Relationships.
Starbucks is not the only company that firmly believes that an emphasis on relationships should be more than simply management rhetoric. Nor is it the only company that … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Gary L. Neilson, Ranjay Gulati, Sarah Huffman | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Best Practices, Case Related