What Does Effective Management Look Like? This Zicklin Professor Has an Idea

If Richard Kopelman were a painter instead of a professor, he’d be a Cubist.

Kopelman, a longtime professor in Zicklin’s Narendra Paul Loomba Department of Management, recently published a textbook called Improving Organizational Performance: The Cube One Framework. The Cube One Framework is “a 3-D model of what determines effective performance in an organization,” Kopelman explains. “The three dimensions represent management practices affecting, respectively, their customers, their employees, and the organization itself.”

The Cube One Framework (see diagram below) looks a bit like a Rubik’s Cube: It’s a large cube comprised of smaller ones, with three cubes along each side, or 27 total. The cube in the square marked “1” would represent an organization following best practices in all three areas, while the cube marked “27” would represent one following the poorest.

Kopelman’s Cube-One Framework

Workplace productivity was a hot topic back in the 1980s when Kopelman, fresh out of Harvard Business School, began publishing his research on the subject. By the end of the decade, however, he’d realized that “managing for productivity is but one-third of the job,” he says. “Successful organizations have to be concerned with retaining and satisfying employees as well as customers.”

The research that went into The Cube One Framework is impressive. Kopelman carried out two dozen studies that included survey research conducted in four countries (including Singapore and Brazil), analyses of stock market valuations, and case studies of successful organizations such as Zappos and the Mayo Clinic.

Despite — or maybe because of — so much research, Kopelman notes that the evidence shows there isn’t any one set of practices that will always keep an organization running well. Not only that, but the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, “with many people working remotely,” throw wild cards into the managerial mix. 

And speaking of wild cards, Kopelman is also a scholar of other subjects — including narcissism, believe it or not. His most recent research on this topic was published in 2016. “In my opinion,” he deadpans, “my research on narcissism is the finest to date on that topic, and perhaps in all of psychology.”

He’s not serious. But he does bear a serious resemblance to the senior senator from Vermont, except that Kopelman has more hair. “Quite a few people called me ‘Bernie’ this summer,” he admits, then waits a beat. “When I wore my baseball cap.”

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