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.