Elephants and Cheetahs: The Beauty of Operations

Description

Do systems have souls?This book, based on a popular elective at IIM Ahmedabad, examines the hard trade-offs inherent in the design of operating systems and business models to look for answers. It encourages business leaders to ask two different sets of existential questions: does the organization that I am managing have a soul, and if so, what are the strategic choices that enable its synthesis (external orientation) and, do I have a soul and if so who am I (internal orientation)? In the process, it uncovers a beauty inherent in patterns of strategic choices that enables an organizational soul to emerge and an appreciation of the diversity of such souls.

Saral Mukherjee is an associate professor in the production and quantitative methods area at IIM Ahmedabad. He specializes in Operations management and is involved in research, teaching and consulting in the area of supply chain redesign, operations strategy, marketing-operations interface and managing platform businesses. He is the recipient of the 'Marti Mannariah Gurunath Outstanding Teacher Award' at IIMA in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 and the 'SRK Distinguished PGPX Faculty Award' at IIMA in 2017 and 2020. A production engineer from Jadavpur University, he has worked on production shop floors before joining IIM Calcutta as a doctoral student. His academic career spans close to two decades at IIM Ahmedabad during which he has taught core courses on Operations, Marketing and Ethics for MBA students as well as working executives.