Mumbai's Models of Service Excellence

Think you need exceptional employees, advanced IT, or rigid controls to build a high-performance organization? The dabbawalas of Mumbai prove otherwise. Six days a week, these 5,000 self-managed, semiliterate workers deliver upwards of 130,000 lunches from customers' homes to their offices with astonishing precision--negotiating the crowded city by train, bicycle, and handcart, without the aid of any technology or even cell phones. The 100-year-old service is legendary for its reliability: Despite monsoons, floods, riots, and terrorist attacks, mistakes by the dabbawalas are extremely rare. Thomke, an HBS professor, studied the dabbawalas to find the keys to their success. He uncovered a unique system with four pillars: organization, management, process, and culture. A flat structure, consisting of autonomous units of 25 people each, is well suited to providing low-cost service. The tight schedule of the train lines over which meals are ferried regulates everyone's work. Buffer capacity is built in to address extremely thin margins of error; each unit has extra workers who fill in wherever they are needed, and members are cross-trained in all activities. Variations that might derail the works are discouraged; the lunchboxes used, for instance, are all a standard size. A simple coding system helps workers quickly sort lunches and get them where they need to go. And democratic decision making and deep emotional bonds among workers promote a high degree of cooperation. The dabbawalas show that with the right system, even ordinary workers can achieve the extraordinary.

• International business
• Service quality
• Business models