The Management Lessons....

Tower Building Exercise:

This is one of the exercises which Dr. Mandi does to explain the mantra of Craftsmanship and Modern management. In this, he first asked one of the students in the class to come and build a tower of cubes. The student did an excellent job by building the tower of as many as 17 cubes. This was referred to as Craftsmanship as the work was done only by that student. He then twisted the task and asked 3 people to come: A worker, a manager and a CEO. The worker was blindfolded and followed the instructions of the manager. The CEO was overseeing the task and was communicating only with the manager. This was a perfect example of how the Modern Management system works.

Additional factors which differentiate craftsmanship with modern management is that work is non-parallel in craftsmanship whereas parallel work goes on in modern management. The interdependency is high in case of modern management and there is also deskilling done in case of modern management whereas craftsmanship is about unity in work and having complete skills. Deskilling helps in training and the delegation of work also gets easier.

He also explained the 3Es of Management and the co-relation between them. They are:

Excellence: This can be thought of as the ultimate motive of any organization. This is what strives the organization to work harder and better.

Efficiency: The ratio of output required to the input given is termed as efficiency. It is a quantifiable character.

Effectiveness:  This can be defined as the ability of a person to achieve his desired objective. It is non-quantifiable in nature.

The formula correlating them is as follows:

Excellence = Efficiency * Effectiveness

Theory X and Theory Y managers

Theory X managers:

There are managers who do not have a positive attitude towards the organization. They do not have faith in their team and feel that their team lacks the problem solving ability. They then do not motivate their team and this on many occasions leads to dissatisfactory performance.

Theory Y managers:

In contrast with the Theory X managers, Theory Y managers have a positive attitude towards their team. They have full faith in their team. The team also works with great passion for the organization. The manager also provides a lot of motivation to them and it thus works well.

Employees can also be classified into two types:

Lazy employees: They are the ones who do not take any responsibility and also lack productivity.

Not lazy employees: They are proactive and strive hard to achieve the desired goals.

Now the different combinations of employees and managers give rise to 4 types of situations:

Situation 1:

Employers are lazy and the managers also think that they are lazy and hence they are not able to perform well.

Situation 2:

Employers are not lazy but the managers think that they are lazy. In this kind of situation the team lacks motivation and thus is not able to perform up to the mark.

Situation 3:

Employees are lazy but the manager assumes they are not lazy. This is the situation when the manager motivates their employees a lot. This helps in bringing best results from them and thus increases productivity.

Situation 4:

Employees are not lazy and the manager also thinks that they are not lazy. This is the ideal situation and the most effective results are produced in this situation.  

  

A memorable start.....

Some moments are worth remembering throughout your life. My first experience of an MBA class was exactly among one of them. It really brought a change in me. So what was special about that class? Was it that the first chapter of Principles of Organization and Management was explained really well? Well, in a sense yes it was but not theoretically, it was explained very well practically. The professor was Dr. Mandi as he is popularly and proudly known because of an amazing 1 day Mandi way of selling done every year by the students of NITIE. He asked us not to even open any books unlike the book centric education system in India.

Lifelong learning:

He also made us realize the opportunity cost of studying at NITIE and made us aware of the harsh reality of being beggars. This brought the concept of “Aaj ki roti aaj hi kamana”. Student entrepreneurship is what he promoted and I believe all of us are truly capable of doing so and if we work hard on all dimensions we can surely achieve this.

This led to the second basic mantra which was “Socho becho, becho sikho, sikho socho”. This in its desi style is the very essence of your ability to sell anything. The class really motivated me and brought a complete change in my thought process. I am really looking forward to more amazing classes from our Professor Prasad (Dr. Mandi).

And thus its truly an amazing welcome at NITIE.... 

Would like to end just by saying

We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom, Teachers leave them kids alone