Managing Processes
Description
To learn more about the leadership of process-oriented organizations, Garvin led a roundtable discussion with CEOs who have pioneered these approaches that has been published in Harvard Business Review as 'Leveraging Processes for Strategic Advantage.' He has also written a conceptual paper, 'The Processes of Organization and Management,' published in Sloan Management Review, that summarized the literature in the field, provided an organizing framework, and developed implications for managers, as well as co-authoring an article on decision-making processes, published in Harvard Business Review as 'What You Don't Know About Decision Making.'
Currently, he is studying innovation and decision making processes in large, complex, multibillion dollar corporations. He is particularly interested in the challenges that these organizations face in creating and growing new businesses, which led to the articles 'What Every CEO Should Know About Creating New Businesses' and 'Meeting the Challenge of Corporate Entrepreneurship," and in the role that executive committees and senior management teams play in coordinating, integrating, and overseeing diverse activities. He is also studying the multiple types and levels of general managers (e.g. store managers, district managers, regional managers, and division presidents at large retailers) to understand how their responsibilities and day-to-day tasks differ. That research, conducted with Lynne Levesque, has resulted in a series of cases on the multiple levels of management at Staples as well as an article, "The Multiunit Enterprise," that appeared in the June 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review.