The sight turned quite a few heads on Mumbai's suburban railway network. Long used to ignoring everything in their antlike frenzy, commuters who saw a dapper-looking foreigner gingerly alighting from a local train in the company of a bunch of dabbawalas couldn't help but pause for a while. But if they were puzzled, Stefan H Thomke, William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS), was astonished-and getting more so by the second.
A regular visitor to India for a quarter of a century, Thomke had first read about the dabbawalas in a magazine in his hotel room. He says, "I immediately asked myself: how could an organisation with so few resources, technology and management knowhow achieve such high-delivery performance? When I came back to Boston, I researched the organisation and found more questions than answers."In Pic: Professor John Macomber, co-author of the case study on Dharavi, on a Mumbai street.
Source :: Economic times
