"If you can’t appreciate what you've got, you’d better get what you can appreciate": Pygamlion

We are back here to continue with the series of discussions on the course of Principles of Organization and Management. We enter into the fourth session discussion today. Please refer to the previous posts for reference on the topics that we have covered.

So what's in the stores for today?

The session started with a discussion on 3D Printing (what does that have to do with principles of Organization and Management?). 3D Printing is a novel technology that is being used these days in the field of 3D modeling and prototyping. Various industries such as automobile, construction, etc. are using 3D models printed straight out of CAD drawings to study their behavior when exposed to their working conditions. Scaled models of automobiles are tested in wind tunnels to fine tune their aerodynamics without actually building the vehicle in its skin. It's a pretty intriguing concept however it does come at quite a premium, costs running in excess of Rs 50 lakhs.

Professor Mandi informed us that seniors from our very own college (alumnus, if you may) were actually working in this field. They had set up an organization to help provide 3D Printers for engineering colleges in India. A noble step indeed. I was wondering if only my engineering college had one of these machine, how much fun it would have been to work. You think of a model, you make it on a computer, and instantly you could have it materialize in front of you.

Steadily the session moved on to discuss the matter of Goal Setting and how it can form or deform an organization. Say, for example, taking the tower building as we covered in the previous posts, what would be someone's goal when he sets to build up that tower. If someone wishes to list them under the sub-headings of:
1. Goal Set
2. Goal Achieved
3. Goal (Historical)
4. Potential
5. Realistic Goal Set

6. Realistic Goal Achieved

Not easy if you analyse the situation. I mean, u haven't even started your work of tower building, but you need to be clear about your goal. More specifically, about every minor detail.

This is where the concept of SMART Goals comes up.
S- Specific, Simple, Structure, Sustainable, Sensible

M- Measurable, Motivating

A- Achievable, Ambitious

R- Rational, Realistic

T- Time bound, Tangible

For an organization to thrive, it should have a clear visualization of its SMART goal. When I say organization, I mean all the individuals who build-up the organization.

Here the abstraction of Pygmalion Effect was also considered.

Pygmalion is an English play by noted playwright George Bernard Shaw, where a Phonetics Professor takes up the onus of making a common flower girl elegant and fit enough to pass in the Queen's Garden Party. The idea is, the Professor had confidence in his abilities and placed great expectations on the girl, so that she could perform better. That's what Pygmalion Effect precisely is. It is the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform (Wikipedia, eh!).

Lesson learnt.



Now it was time for a practical demonstration which happened in the next session. A team was called again for that (never ending, huh!) tower building exercise. But this time, it was not mere 'Craftsmanship' as play; It was an organization: structured, coordinated, motivated and high aiming. And the results did show that. From the 16 blocks height in previous attempt by a craftsman and 7 blocks height try from the flustered 'organization' (of sorts), they achieved a commendable 24. Job well done.
But hey, we did learn something, didn't we: not to have a low aim. So the team started again, and broke the previous best record of 27 to reach 28. Great!!!

This is the power of Expectation learned from the Pygmalion Effect and the strength of Organization.

Watch-out this space for more discussions.

eee.... The three E’s!!!

Taking the series of experiences of Principles of Organization Management along, let’s move on to the next session we had.

Yet again, the class lined up for us was cancelled due to unavailability of the Professor-in charge. But hey, you’re in NITIE. There’s no day-offs here. The session, yet again, was taken up by our very own Professor Prasad (or Professor Mandi. I should stop this introduction anyway).

So, what did Professor Mandi had in store for us today?
He walked into the class room with his bag of many things, and a somewhat familiar toy in his hand. I recognized it on the very glance (courtesy: my sister, as she is an alumnus of NITIE (IM16)) as the toy that the previous batches have sold at the event named Mandi (Professor Prasad is called Professor Mandi because of that; more on that in later posts).
But, it was again a day for the wooden cubes. I thought, probably Professor Prasad might have missed out on something in the previous sessions.

The discussion started with a continuation from previous session; a comparison between Craftsmanship and Modern Management. Craftsmanship, as taken up in the previous posts, doesn’t require any management. Here satisfaction may be high, but the glimpse of an organization is nowhere to be seen. On the contrary, Modern Management faces some intricate challenges, which might look easy, but are wholly difficult in their execution.

Craftsmanship requires dexterity; it requires skills to do the work, because there’s no one to cover up for you. In management, however, skills are not much of a priority, as the work is quantified and distributed.
Take an example of a welding shop, not a small one, but a large scale assembly line type (much like the one in an automobile company). There would be a person who would solely do the cleaning of surfaces, another one who would be preparing the edges to be welded and then there would be a welder. Here, the work is suitably divided with a hint of parallelism, such that, if one person fails on a job, the whole shop won’t suffer. By contrast, if you consider all of these tasks being done by one single person, the level of dependency on him reaches a whole new level. In essence, there’s no person-based but process-based work involved in modern management.

The three E’s, as the title of this post suggests, becomes the spine of management. That’s Effectiveness, Efficiency and Excellence, combined together to form a mantra that is followed in an organization.

Excellence = Effectiveness X Efficiency

Bear in mind that it is a multiplicative equation and not an additive one. And how does one define these E’s? To quote Professor Prasad, ‘more out of less is Efficiency’ and ‘more out of less for more is Excellence’. The effectiveness needs to be present, because clearly, making more out of less without serving any purpose is waste (duh!).

Towards the end of the session, there was a bid for making the tower, in the same fashion as discussed in the previous post (I thought, we won’t be using those cubes today; naivety). This time though, there was a slight change. Now, there was a bid for the CEO of the company, a mid-level manager and a worker (with suitable bidding cost for each of them).

Professor Prasad did find his men, but due to shortage of time, this activity was postponed to the next session.

With this, the session ended.

Watch out this space for more experiences.

For towers and craftsman and organization and management!!!

Continuing the series of posts of sharing experiences at Principle of Organization and Management, this one might just come out a little bit more interesting.

We’ll start with a question. You have some wooden cubes of 2cm x 2cm. Not all of them have perfect surfaces. How tall, a single file tower could you make with them? 10 cubes, 20. Your take!

It’s not a simple question to start with. You could only estimate.

Here we were in the class room (Syndicate-1, eh), and Professor Mandi (or Professor Prasad) came to the session with some cubes and asked the same question. He then asked someone to come up and make it, but for the added twist, anyone who wished to come, would have to furnish the bidding cost. We started the bid at Rs 100 which was settled at Rs 500. A fellow classmate volunteered to build the tower and estimated a rise of upto 20 cubes (quite ambitious, huh).

He started all alone and made a tower of 16 cubes. Commendable!

So what’s the use of all this. Professor Prasad described the single-handed tower making as CRAFTSMANSHIP, no management as such. But that’s not what ORGANIZATIONS are. An organization is built on the principle of modern management, where whatever the task may be, gets quantified and divided amongst a team who wish to fulfil the same objective.
I mean, that’s what an organization is; a social entity that has a collective goal (Wikipedia, eh).

                                                       

How many people does one need to do a task as simple as this? Say, you require 5 people. But what work should be assigned to all these members. It’s an easy piece of work in itself but when asked to do as a team, dividing it into modules becomes unfathomable.

To demonstrate what it means to be a part of an organization, Professor Prasad called upon a few people (8 turned up). Then, the same task of tower building was given to them, but here, it would be just one person building the tower while the others would have to give precise instructions, but not to the one making the tower. The instructions would be directed to another person in the 8 member team, who would be conveying the messages to the one making the tower, because, for the added zest, he would be blindfolded. The task now became plainly difficult.

One would have expected them to better the 16 cube height working as a team, but in view of new instructions, things didn’t quite work out as planned.  The team’s tower collapsed after 7 blocks (hmmm). I could see the apparent difficulty associated with the task, because plainly there were 6 different noises, and it became hugely difficult for the one in the blindfold to listen to crisp instruction. This is what happens in managing an organization. Unless you have specific tasks defined for everyone, utter chaos.

These six members, as Professor Prasad later explained, were the mid-tier managers, who when present in excess would just confuse the workers (here, the one building the tower). Sadly, this is the situation with many companies in the world. So, a FLAT organization structure should be followed, by removing the excess of middle management, and increasing the effectiveness of the organization on the whole.

Toward the end of the session, a concept called ‘Just in time’ was discussed. In an industry, just in time orders are as simple as needs; as the need arises, the stock is made available. The aspect of inventory is simply of no use.

With that, the session ended but the learning didn’t.
Watch out this space for more experiences.

New Life, New Beginning

Day one of college life (Part II) started with the 'God’s Own Campus' (NITIE is called just that) greeting us with lovely weather. A promising start, one would think. I woke up early to avoid being late on the very first day, however, every molecule of my body was willing to succumb to the mesmerizing climate, and crawl back into the bed. I somehow climbed out and got ready for the new beginning.

First session lined up for the day was cancelled due to the unavailability of the Professor in-charge, but somewhat to our fortune, the session was taken-up by Professor Mandi (aka Prof. T. Prasad).

Professor Prasad came to Syndicate-1 (fancy name for a classroom) to enlighten us with the simple and basic principles of Organization and Management, a course that he has mastered over the years. Professor Prasad started with throwing a few stress balls around the class and passing on some very basic but intriguing toys, which included a self-balancing butterfly and a wooden hen that could walk down a slope without any ‘worldly’ force. I was wondering what he meant to do with them. I mean, here we were in a class, filled with some of the best minds, and the Professor shows up with toys, that didn't even feel remotely related to what we’d learn.

Professor Mandi walked up to me, handed over that pink butterfly, and asked a very simple question, ‘What can you teach someone about this?’ To my surprise, I was able to come up with a few physics concepts, with which he was pleased. He went to other students as well and asked the same question. People did give some really good suggestions (best minds, aren’t they).

He then took centre stage and explained why he was going about asking those questions. He, very humbly, told how good it would be if we could teach these simple concepts to the students less fortunate than us. If we could have a documented account of whatever we learned in the class and made it available to the world, how beneficial it would be for the society; the entire concept of clichéd classroom teaching would become completely obsolete. It then struck me what the Man was talking about. He made me realize the importance of sharing and not limiting the knowledge to oneself.

A very enlightening thing happened later in the class, where Professor Prasad made some calculations about our personal daily cost. I analysed that for a day, my investment comes to around Rs 2500; that’s the cost of me leaving my job, paying the fees of the college and staying in the city of Mumbai. Shocked!!! Even I was, but that’s ‘economical’ compared to other B-schools. Professor Prasad, in a very distinct way of his, showed the importance of earning my daily chores; making a point to earn my ‘roti’ (‘Aaj ki roti, aaj hi kamaao’ is what he said) for the day. He very cleverly, connected this simple analysis to the complicated concept of Entrepreneurship which would ultimately be connected to the course that he would be teaching us in the coming days.

Towards the later part of the class, Professor Prasad discussed his own and much talked about management jargon, ‘Socho Becho, Becho Seekho, Seekho Socho’; that’s think and sell, sell and learn, and learn and think. Intriguing thought?

A simple idea but then I thought it can’t be so simple when Professor Mandi is around. Professor Prasad explained it to the class that how easy it becomes for students to learn about management while actually running their own company. He also gave us a glimpse of the events that have been lined up for the future.

In the second half of the day, we had another session with Professor Mandi, where to our surprise we got an opportunity to sing along with the class. And what better song could it be than the classic ‘Brick in the Wall’ from Pink Floyd. Professor Prasad holds the song close to himself, owing to the message that it delivers. 

Rarely would you find a Professor himself condemning the format of education being followed in the country.
Towards the end of the session, the course outline was also discussed.

In totality, a fun filled start to the 'new life'; somewhat unexpected. But I think it was Professor Prasad’s way to get us gelled to the new format of learning that will be followed here in NITIE.