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Sunday 23 June 2013

Craft Vs Modern Management


This blog is about my experience and learnings from the second lecture of Dr. Mandi. With every class he brings something new and interesting for us.He doesn't believe in giving lectures rather he teaches every concept with help of a fun exercise.
This time he taught us the basic difference of craft and modern management with the help of live exercise of tower building.

In our 2nd class of Principles of Organization & Management by Professor Dr. mandi, we are assigned a tower building activity by using uniform wooden cubes with one participant doing it open eyed and other participant had few constraints that he can use only ODD hand and will be blind-folded,but he was provided with a manager to help him build the tower.What seems first a kind of mere team building event eventually becomes a source of management gyans, an arena to apply organizational principles, a fun learning experience and simultaneous discussion on the intricacies of running a business.
 We encountered following 2 different scenarios -

Scenario
Proposed Count
Actual Count
1
Single person
15
22
2
Blindfolded person and his manager
22+
27

Here are my intakes from the tower building activity:
To work on a business idea, one needs a prior market research. Here in tower building activity, participants have access to historical data of Class PGDIM-19 batch where they able to build a tower up-to height of 17 cubes.In present competitive environment, every organization requires to re-analyze their goal through SMARTER way.


S-Specific: Goal of an organization needs to be well defined and easily understandable. It constitutes the mission and vision of the organization. Specific goal/mission energies its employee to work together to attain the common goal of the organization
M-Measurable: A goal should be within the measurable parameters. Without measurement, it will be difficult to keep a track of progress as well as planning. A well-defined measurement scale will also help to find critical path of an activity and subsequent planning.

A-Achievable: The goal must be well achievable under the given circumstances. Sometimes it is difficult to set a large goal. In that case, organization needs to set up small sub goals and based on the capabilities, new goal can be defined. An unachievable goal will lead to a capital-starved and debt-ridden organization. Here we can take the case of Kingfisher airline. It established itself as premium class airliner. However they have set a goal to establish themselves as premier class as well as low cost carrier at the same time. Acquisition of Air Deccan results in mismatch between two brands and finally grounding of its flight in many of the routes and financial crunch of Kingfisher airline.

R-Relevant: A relevant goal is always must, especially for start-ups. An organization always first needs to exploit its core-competence. Google at the time of inception,put its goal to be a better search engine. Only after it attained its goal, it starts venturing into other services like social media( orkut/Google plus),video sharing(you tube) etc.

T-Time Bound: A project without a deadline makes everything complicated. For instance ,Haldia Petrochemical Plant in West Bengal is still loss making because of delay in completion of its plant commissioning by 2 years which leads to interest burden of Rs.600-700 crores per year and inflationary cost escalation to the tune of 10% per year of the original project cost.

E-Evaluate and R-Re-evaluate: The last stage of SMARTER goal is to constantly evaluate the progress of organization goals and objectives and re-evaluate/re-do goals according to the changing market environment.



Parameter
Open Eyed (Old school of management)
Blind Folded (Modern school of management)
Productivity
Less
More
Satisfaction of work
More
Less
Division of work
Not clear
Crystal clear
Skill Set
Skilled
Deskilled
Work quantity
enlarged
Broken in segments

Hence, We conclude that modern management is very important for the success of any organization.

Thursday 20 June 2013

As I saw my name in the NITIE merit list, I felt as if I had  achieved all that I wished to at this junction of my career after continuously trying for three years to get here.Then came up all the apprehensions about this. The friends, classmates, hostels, campus life etc. But in just 3 days I met people whom I can call friends for life.

After my 1 and half years of work-ex at L&T I grew fond of the action packed life of an engineer who has to sweat it out on the shop floor everyday. I thought that I will be spending the next 2 years of my academic life sitting on a chair in an air conditioned lecture hall, jotting down points and listening to serious intellectual people. But all these went for a toss when a man popularly known as Dr. Mandi  marched into our class.



 He went straight to the Dias, removed  his slippers, sat there, took out toys from his bag and threw them towards us. The nursery class toys in Principles of Management class...!!!! I was taken aback by seeing all this happening.


The newtons balls, the butterfly and the globe made us look at life the way we saw never before. With the help of newtons  balls he showed us that we receive in the proportion we give. The same concept holds in Business too, when value is created and delivered to customers,customers come back to you with equal effect creating your value in the market.

He was sure that he will not let us be a lazy bunch of students who copy their assignments.So, gave us blogs to write where we have to update the lectures to share the knowledge with everyone out there.

The blocks made us challenge the own limits we have set for ourselves. His trademark lines, "Another Brick in the Wall”. “Socho – Becho, Becho – Sikho, Sikho – Socho" have added spice to the class. These have made it one of the few classes I don't go just for the attendance. Waiting for his next class to have more of these... :)











MANDI


Mandi s a unique on field marketing exercise from the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE - MUMBAI ) led by Dr. Prasad ( so the name Dr. Mandi ). Here in students go out on the streets to sell educational toys.This idea is to practically implement sales strategies,interact and understand customer behaviour live.