Frances X. Frei

Frances X. Frei

UPS Foundation Professor of Service Management

UPS Foundation Professor of Service Management

Technology and Operations Management
+1 (617) 495-7968
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Frances X. Frei
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(617) 495-7968
Featured Work Publications Research Summary Teaching Awards & Honors

Frances Frei is a Professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School. Her research investigates how leaders create the conditions for organizations and individuals to thrive by designing for excellence in strategy, operations and culture. She regularly advises senior executives embarking on large-scale change initiatives and organizational transformation, including embracing diversity and inclusion as a lever for significantly improving performance.

A global thought leader on leadership and strategy, Frances is widely recognized for her dynamic teaching style and breakthrough courses optimized for rapid, lasting impact. She developed one of the most popular classes at HBS, which explores business models that reliably delight customers. She also led the design and launch of HBS’s innovative FIELD curriculum built around learning experiences that are experiential and immersive.

While at HBS, Frances has held extensive leadership roles including Senior Associate Dean for faculty development and recruiting, for executive education, and faculty chair for the MBA required curriculum. Within each of these roles, Frances led significant change efforts. Highlights including addressing the gender gap in satisfaction and performance for students and faculty and broadening the reach of executive education to incorporate the evolving needs of executives and their organizations.  This includes enhancing our off-campus program as well as using our state-of-the art HBX studio on campus.

In 2017, Frances was tapped to be Uber's first Senior Vice President of Leadership and Strategy with a mandate to help the company navigate its very public crisis in leadership and culture. In her ongoing work with Uber, she has focused on giving thousands of employees the tools to excel in a context of hyper-growth, strategic change, and an evolution in cultural values.

Her firsthand experience in Silicon Valley gave her a new lens on the urgent topic of trust, and in May 2018, Frances delivered a widely-viewed TED talk on ‘How to build (and rebuild) trust.’  This powerful framework delivers a crash course on stakeholder trust:  how to build it, maintain it and restore it when lost.

Frances is the best-selling author of Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business. She and her co-author Anne Morriss published their second book, Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You, in June 2020.

She holds a Ph.D. in Operations and Information Management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Featured Work
Unleashed
The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You

When leaders seek out advice, they’re often told to fix themselves. Should they?

When leaders want to improve, they will find no shortage of ideas to help them. They’re told to identify and develop their natural-born strengths, mine failures for insights into what to change, and work to correct real or perceived career-limiting deficiencies.

In Unleashed, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that this popular leadership advice glosses over the most important thing you do as a leader: Build others up. Leadership isn’t about you. It’s about how effective you are at empowering other people—and making sure that this impact endures even in your absence.

Unleashed​ provides radical advice for the practice of leadership today. Showing how the boldest, most effective leaders use a special combination of trust, love, and belonging to create spaces where other people can excel, Frances and Anne offer practical, battle-tested tools—based on their work in companies such as Uber, Riot Games, and others—along with interviews and stories from their own personal experience to make these ideas come alive.

This book is your indispensable guide for unleashing greatness in other people and, ultimately, in yourself.

Uncommon Service
How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business
Most companies treat service as a low-priority business operation, keeping it out of the spotlight until a customer complains. Then service gets to make a brief appearance – for as long as it takes to calm the customer down and fix whatever foul-up jeopardized the relationship.

In Uncommon Service, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss show how, in a volatile economy where the old rules of strategic advantage no longer hold true, service must become a competitive weapon, not a damage-control function. That means weaving service tightly into every core decision your company makes.

The authors reveal a transformed view of service, presenting an operating model built on tough choices organizations must make:

• How do customers define “excellence” in your offering? Is it convenience? Friendliness? Flexible choices? Price?

• How will you get paid for that excellence? Will you charge customers more? Get them to handle more service tasks themselves?

• How will you empower your employees to deliver excellence? What will your recruiting, selection, training, and job design practices look like? What about your organizational culture?

• How will you get your customers to behave? For example, what do you need to do to get them to treat your employees with respect? Do you need to make it easier for them to use new technology?

Practical and engaging, Uncommon Service makes a powerful case for a new and systematic approach to service as a means of boosting productivity, profitability, and competitive advantage.
How to Build (and Rebuild) Trust

Trust is the foundation for everything we do. But what do we do when it's broken? In an eye-opening talk, Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei gives a crash course in trust: how to build it, maintain it and rebuild it -- something she worked on during a recent stint at Uber. "If we can learn to trust one another more, we can have unprecedented human progress," Frei says.

The Four Things a Service Business Must Get Right

All successful firms must design a compelling offering and manage the workforce to deliver it at an attractive price. But service firms must do even more: deal with the frustrating fact that their customers can wreak havoc on service quality and costs. Align these key elements: service offering, funding mechanism, employee management and customer management to get it right.

Books
Journal Articles
Book Chapters
  • Campbell, Dennis, and Frances X. Frei. "Cost Structure Patterns in the Asset Management Industry." Chap. 8 in Operational Control in Asset Management: Processes and Costs, edited by Michael Pinedo, 154–168. Denmark: SimCorp StrategyLab, 2010. View Details
  • Frei, Frances X., and Patrick T. Harker. "Value Creation and Process Management: Evidence from Retail Banking." In Creating Value in Financial Services, edited by E. Melnick, P. Nayyar, M. Pinedo, and S. Seshadri. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. View Details
  • Frei, F., P. Harker, and L. Hunter. "Inside the Black Box: What Makes a Bank Efficient." In Financial Institutions: Efficiency, Innovation, Regulation, edited by P. Harker and S. Zenios. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. View Details
  • Hitt, Lorin M., Frances X. Frei, and Patrick T. Harker. "How Financial Firms Decide on Technology." In Brookings Wharton Papers on Financial Services, 1999, edited by Robert E. Litan and Anthony M. Santomero, 93–146. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999. View Details
  • Frei, F., P. Harker, and L. Hunter. "Retail Banking." In U.S. Industry in 2000: Studies in Competitive Performance, edited by David Mowrey. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999. View Details
  • Kalakota, R., and F. Frei. "Frontiers of Online Financial Services." Chap. 2 in Banking and Finance on the Internet, edited by M. Cronin, 19–74. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1997. View Details
Working Papers
Cases and Teaching Materials
Other Publications and Materials
Research Summary
Organizational Effectiveness
This research studies the obstacles that systematically get in the way of organizational effecitiveness.  In the past I have paid particular attention to service organizations, which account for over 70% of organizations in most developed countries.  This research studies mature organizations as well as early stage ventures.  I am currently investigating two periods in an organizations lifecycle: rapid growth and turbulent times.
Keywords: Organizational Effectiveness; Organizations; Entrepreneurship; Service; Growth; Management
Managing Service Operations Course Development
Managing Service Operations is an Elective Curriculum course taught at HBS. Over thirty cases and exercises have been created for the course. For a list of the cases developed for this course, please see the Publications link below.  For the most recent syllabus, click here: MSO Syllabus.

Managing the Operating Role of Customers
Customers in operating roles introduce considerable variability into the production environment including differences in the demands they impose on the environment and the unpredictability of those demands. When customers are the source of production variability, the service experience can rely heavily on accommodating that variability. However, operational efficiency typically demands reducing variability. This research explores the challenge of managing the tradeoff between operational efficiency and service value, providing prescriptions for how to mitigate its effects through influencing customer behavior. See HBS 606-032 for a detailed discussion of managing the operating role of customers.
Service Excellence by Design
This research addresses how to design sustainable service models that deliver ongoing value to both customers and the firm. In particular, the research reveals three principles of effective service management (see HBS 606-031 for a detailed discussion of these design principles):

  • Ground the service offering in specific service attributes.
  • Build an explicit mechanism for funding the service offering.
  • Set employees up to reasonably deliver the service offerings value.

Managing Customer Information
After a service offering is implemented, firms routinely collect significant amounts of data, including customer, employee, and firm financial data. However, service firms are not nearly as effective as they could be in taking advantage of these data. This research argues that a major shift in mindset is required before many organizations can effectively generate actionable insights from readily available data. See HBS 606-097 for a framework for approaching service management problems that can be informed by data analysis.
How to Manage Customers for Increased Profits and Customer Satisfaction
For many service firms, the customer plays an important role in contributing to the cost and/or quality of the service. This is very different than many manufacturing contexts, for example, where the firm has virtually complete control over product cost and quality. In these instances, firms need to design and manage customer involvement explicitly. By cultivating the appropriate environment, firms can harness customer efforts to the advantage of both the firm and customer. By not carefully managing this, however, firms can experience escalating costs in the face of eroding satisfaction.
Teaching
Technology and Operations Management

This course enables students to develop the skills and concepts needed to ensure the ongoing contribution of a firm's operations to its competitive position. It helps them to understand the complex processes underlying the development and manufacture of products as well as the creation and delivery of services.

Topics encompass:

  • Process analysis
  • Cross-functional and cross-firm integration
  • Product development
  • Information technology
  • Technology and operations strategy
Leading Difference

Leading Difference fundamentally challenges our view of the type of leadership that is needed in a world that is increasingly divided and in organizations that are increasingly diverse. Inclusion, in such a world, is an organizational advantage that is fundamental to our core mandate as leaders. The course will provide tools, pattern recognition, and perspective intended to help you navigate difference successfully in your career and to build and lead organizations that are truly inclusive.

This course seeks to bring increased empathy and clarity to the discussion of workforce differences. This course will introduce a new definition of inclusive leadership: Leadership is about making other people better as a result of our presence in a way that lasts into our absence.

With this definition at this core, the course will take students on a journey of the key ingredients that are needed for this type of leadership to be effective. In our presence, as leaders we need to engender trust, empower others, and create the conditions for more and more varied people to thrive. In our absence, we need to be thoughtful about strategy and culture. For each key ingredient, we will explore concrete strategies we can embrace as leaders. For instance, to be truly inclusive we need to act as brokers, leveraging our experiences to help others understand their differences and have productive conversations across divides. And we’ll also explore the implications of getting the recipe right: when we create inclusive environments, collaboration occurs more easily, and respect becomes a basic ingredient baked into every interaction.

This is a general leadership course and as such will not, for example, provide all of the specialized skills a D&I leader may require.

Strategy

The objective of this course is to help students develop the skills for formulating strategy. It provides an understanding of:

  • A firm's operative environment and how to sustain competitive advantage.
  • How to generate superior value for customers by designing the optimum configuration of the product mix and functional activities.
  • How to balance the opportunities and risks associated with dynamic and uncertain changes in industry attractiveness and competitive position.

Students learn to:

  • Develop a mastery of a body of analytical tools and the ability to take an integrative point of view.
  • Use these tools to perform in-depth analyses of industries and competitors, predict competitive behavior, and analyze how firms develop and sustain competitive advantage over time.

Particular attention is paid to competitive positioning; understanding comparative costs; and addressing issues such as cannibalization, network externalities, and globalization.

Why You Should Care: Creating the Conditions for of Excellence

CCE explores how to identify and overcome the barriers to personal and professional excellence. Through a series of case studies we will investigate the common challenges that hinder even the most effective organizations and individuals as they intersect with these structures. A belief in or curiosity about the personal point of view is required as we assess how to belong to and lead organizations.

Managing Service Operations

Managing Service Operations (MSO) focuses on how firms can deliver excellent service while achieving business success. This involves a deep understanding of customers, competitors, and the firm's internal mechanisms.

Career Focus

Managing Service Operations investigates how to design and manage firms to achieve sustainable service excellence. Service excellence is sustained when value is created for owners, employees, and customers. This course is appropriate for those planning to work in service firms and for those working in companies that analyze or provide support to service businesses, such as consulting or venture capital firms. The course has a strong emphasis on consumer services, with only modest attention to business services.

Educational Objectives

The course explores how managers can influence customers, employees, and service designs to create and capture value. Through exposure to a wide range of industries (e.g., financial services, government, health care, hospitality, and retail) students will gain tangible lessons from each class that they can use in a broader context.

Field Immersion Experiences in Leadership Development
HBS students have traditionally been immersed in a case-study method that has encouraged them to think like leaders. As a part of the school’s recent curriculum innovation, Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development (FIELD) gives students meaningful opportunities to act like leaders, translating their ideas into practice. FIELD is a required first-year course that spans a full academic year, divided into three parts: leadership intelligence (FIELD 1), global intelligence (FIELD 2), and integrative intelligence (FIELD 3). 
Related Link: http://www.hbs.edu/mba/academic-experience/FIELD/Pages/default.aspx
Awards & Honors
Received multiple HBS Student Association Faculty Teaching Awards.
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