Service Management Guru

Frances Frei is the UPS Foundation Professor of Service Management in Harvard Business School’s Technology and Operations Management Department. She focuses her research and teaching on guiding leaders to compete on excellence by designing, managing, and scaling exceptional service firms. As one of the world’s experts on service management, Professor Frei influences the minds of the global economy’s future corporate stars and shapes the strategies of the world’s most competitive companies.

A legend in Harvard Business School MBA and Executive Education classrooms, Professor Frei is widely recognized for her remarkably dynamic teaching style. She developed the Managing Service Operations elective, which is among the most popular courses in Harvard Business School’s history. She has received the Excellence in Teaching and 1984 Awards from the Wharton School of Business and has been honored with the prestigious HBS Student Association Faculty Award for teaching excellence several times.

Professor Frei has published innumerable groundbreaking articles and book chapters on Service Management topics in Harvard Business Review, Management Science, and other top-tier business journals, including the classic article, The Four Things a Service Business Must Get Right, HBR, April 2008. In addition, she has published dozens of case studies across a variety of industries, including financial services, government, retail, software, telecommunications, and travel & leisure. Professor Frei is writing her eagerly anticipated book on service management and shares her nimble thinking through the popular Decision to Lead blog, http://decisiontolead.com/author/concire/.

Frances Frei is famous for providing students and business leaders and students with tools and frameworks to analyze service models from the perspective of customers, employees, and owners. When speaking and consulting for global corporate clients, she invariably receives the highest evaluation scores with audience members often asking if they can give her a score of “6” or even “10” on a scale of 1-5. Recent audience comments include: “This was truly THE BEST learning experience I EVER had!” and “You are a genius!”

Professor Frei received her Ph.D. in Operations and Information Management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds an M.E. in Industrial Engineering from Pennsylvania State University, and a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania.