Stefan Thomke’s research shows up in the Bollywood film.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: A Harvard professor had the interesting experience of going to see the Hindi film The Lunchbox, and hearing the characters talk about his own research on the big screen.
Stefan Thomke is the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School (HBS). The husband of an Indian wife, Thomke has visited India several times over the last 20 years, and always found himself entranced with the concept of “dabbawalas” – the deliverymen who snake their way through Mumbai, delivering lunches on time and to the correct person every single weekday.
Knowing that research into the dabbawala phenomenon would be of great academic interest – according to The Wall Street Journal, efficiency experts have often been amazed at how well-oiled the dabbawala machine is – Thomke began compiling research in 2008. Over the course of many months, Thomke conducted field research in Mumbai, discovering how the dabbawala system ran and, more importantly, how amazing efficient it really is.
Thomke published “The Dabbawala System: On-Time Delivery, Every Time” in September of last year, which outlined the stats that the dabbawalas really put up. According to the report, “The Mumbai-based dabbawalas are a 5,000 or so person organization that achieves exceptional service performance with a semi-literate workforce. Every working day, they deliver and return about 130,000 lunchboxes to offices throughout Mumbai. This entails more than 260,000 transactions within six hours each day, six days a week, 52 weeks a year (minus holidays) and mistakes are extremely rare.”
In fact, just one lunch in one million is delivered to the wrong person, a fact so astonishing that Sony Pictures, the North American distributor of The Lunchbox, decided to use that as part of its tagline for the film. Knowing that the statistic came from Thomke, the film’s German distributor managed to track him down and send him a copy, and to Thomke’s surprise, a character in the film actually quotes the “one in one million” finding.
Thomke told The Wall Street Journal he was shocked, and started laughing at how far his research had gone. He said he loved the movie (he’s not alone), and has begun assigning it to his classes, as a case study in large-scale efficiency and, well, to showcase his own work.
Directed by Ritesh Bhatra, The Luncbox is about a widower (Irrfan Khan) and an unhappy housewife (Nimrat Kaur) who exchange notes to each other anonymously via a lunchbox, delivered to Khan’s character by a dabbawala (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). The film has played well in limited release within North America over the past few weeks, and is getting a wider release this weekend. It won the Filmfare Award for Best Film (Critics) last month.
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com