Saral Mukherjee is an associate professor in the production and quantitative methods area at IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA). He specializes in Operations Management and is involved in research, teaching and consulting in the areas of supply chain redesign, operations strategy, marketing-operations interface and managing platform businesses. He is a recipient of the Marti Mannariah Gurunath Outstanding Teacher Award at IIMA for seven successive years, from 2014 to 2020, and the SRK Distinguished PGPX Faculty Award at IIMA for 2017 and 2020. A production engineer from Jadavpur University, he worked on production shop floors before joining IIM Calcutta as a doctoral student. In an academic career spanning close to two decades at IIMA, he has taught core courses on Operations, Marketing and Ethics for MBA students as well as working executives.Do systems have souls? This book, based on a popular elective at IIM Ahmedabad, looks for answers in the hard trade-offs inherent in the design of operating systems and business models. It encourages business leaders to ask two different sets of existential questions: Does the organization that I am managing have a soul, and if so, what are the strategic choices that enable its synthesis (external orientation)? And, do I have a soul, and if so, who am I (internal orientation)? In the process, it uncovers a beauty inherent in patterns of strategic choices that enables an organizational soul to emerge, and an appreciation of the diversity of such souls.Mukherjee infuses emotion and passion into what is generally seen as a dry subject in academics or a prosaic endeavor in business. But he doesn't let his love and emotion overtake reason.How are elephants and cheetahs related to operations strategy? A new book uses these metaphors inspired by nature as a means to arrive at a better appreciation of the system being studied.
