Frances X. Frei

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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 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.

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.

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 (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.