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.