Decision Making and Problem solving :) :)

Problem Solving....

 Have you ever been creative? Thought of a solution that is different.? If the Answer is yes, you have already been part of the Process called ‘Creative Problem Solving’. If the Answer is no….No issues, this write up will guide you to be a Creative Problem Solver...


“Creative problem solving is - looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.” - Albert Szent- Gyorgi, former Nobel prize winner

Creative Problem Solving is a proven method for approaching a problem or a challenge in an imaginative and innovative way. It’s a tool that helps people re-define the problems they face, come up with breakthrough ideas and then take action on these new ideas.

Sounds Exciting!

Let us get into what constitutes Creative Problem Solving……

Step 1:State what appears to be the problem.

The real problem may not surface until facts have been gathered and analyzed.  Therefore, start with what you assume to be the  problem, that can later be confirmed or corrected.

STEP 2.  Gather facts, feelings and opinions

Answer the 5 W (when, where, why, what, who) and the How questions..

z         What happened?

z         Where, when and how did it occur?

z         What is it’s size, scope, and severity?

z         Who and what is affected?

z         Likely to happen again?

There might be a need to assign priorities to critical elements.

STEP 3: Restate the problem

Restating the problem helps in reassessing the problem.

Actual Problem , might not be what was stated before.

STEP 4 Identify alternative solutions

Think of  the alternative solutions. At this step the ideas are generated, no idea should be ruled out until several have been discussed. There should not be a hesitancy to discuss an idea, as it may seem unfeasible, many times such unfeasible ideas become what we call as creative solutions.

STEP 5: Evaluate alternatives

    Ask these 4 questions:

z         Which will provide the optimum solution?

z         What are the risks?

z         Are costs in keeping with the benefits?

z         Will the solution create new problems?

At this step you are moving very closer to your final solution.

     Discuss all the alternatives, keeping in mind the different parameters. By the end of this step you would have arrived at your Optimum solution.

      STEP 6.  Implement the decision!

     Just arriving at the solution, does not solve the problem! The Solution needs to be implemented…

       Time for asking some more questions…

z         Who must be involved?

z         To what extent?

z         How, when and where?

z         Who will the decision impact?

z         What might go wrong?

z         How will the results be reported and verified?

After finding answers to these questions, you are ready to implement your  ‘Creative Solution’.

STEP 7.   Evaluate the results.

z         Test the solution against the desired results.

z         Make revisions if necessary.

After the solution has been implemented, it needs to be verified if it serves its need.

If it needs any modifications, the same are to be re implemented.

TOOLS & TECHNIQUES

  BRAINSTORMING

To generate a large number of ideas in a short period of time. 

• The more ideas the better! 
•   No discussion
• No idea is a bad idea
• Display all ideas
•  Build on one another’s ideas
• 
  

        MULTIVOTING

         A way to vote to select the most important or popular items (alternatives) from a list.

        

       MIND MAPPING

       :  A visual picture of a group of ideas, concepts or issues.

          Purpose:

 Unblock our thinking.

See an entire idea or several ideas on one sheet of paper.

See how ideas relate to one another.

Look at things in a new and different way.

Look at an idea in depth.

Enjoy the journey !!!!!

X or Y???

THEORY X or Y?

Theory X and Theory Y are theories of human motivation created and developed by Douglas McGregor at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the 1960s. He avoided descriptive labels and simply called the Theory X and Theory Y. He did not imply that workers would be one type or the other. Rather, he saw the two theories as two extremes - with a whole spectrum of possible behaviors in between.

Theory X: ('Authoritarian management' style)

Management that believes in theory-X assumptions, creates stick-and-carrot approach based firms with restrictive discipline and pervasive controls.

Theory Y: ('Participative management' style)

Theory-Y believers create trust based firms with empowered employees.

Assumptions of Theory X and Theory Y:

Comparing Theory X and Theory Y:

Motivation

 Theory X assumes that people dislike work; they want to avoid it and do not want to take responsibility. Theory Y assumes that people are self-motivated, and thrive on responsibility.

Management Style and Control

 In a Theory X organization, management is authoritarian, and centralized control is retained, whilst in Theory Y, the management style is participative: Management involves employees in decision making, but retains power to implement decisions.

Work Organization

 Theory X employees tend to have specialized and often repetitive work. In Theory Y, the work tends to be organized around wider areas of skill or knowledge; Employees are also encouraged to develop expertise and make suggestions and improvements.

Rewards and Appraisals

 Theory X organizations work on a ‘carrot and stick’ basis, and performance appraisal is part of the overall mechanisms of control and remuneration. In Theory Y organizations, appraisal is also regular and important, but is usually a separate mechanism from organizational controls. Theory Y organizations also give employees frequent opportunities for promotion.

Application 

 Although Theory X management style is widely accepted as inferior to others, it has its place in large scale production operation and unskilled production-line work. Many of the principles of Theory Y are widely adopted by types of organization that value and encourage participation. Theory Y-style management is suited to knowledge work and professional services. Professional service organizations naturally evolve Theory Y-type practices by the nature of their work; Even highly structure knowledge work, such as call center operations, can benefits from Theory Y principles to encourage knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.

Alibaba

Every man's ability may be strengthened or increased by culture."

                                                              ---- John Abbott (Former Canadian PM)

THE ALIBABA GROUP

    

             We started the class with a discussion on the AliBaba Group. AliBaba Groupis a privately owned China-based family of Internet-based eCommerce businesses that cover business-to-business online marketplaces, retail and payment platforms, shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services. 

The company was started by Jack Ma based on the simple realizations that he had:

    1. I don't have the money.

    2. I don't have a plan. 

    3. If you can't use the internet in this age, you are useless.

What was Jack Ma's objectives with AliBaba?

    (a) Empower SMEs through the power of the internet.

    (b) At least 80% of these SMEs who are working with AliBaba MUSTgrow unimaginably.

    (c) 0.0001% of the shares of AliBaba must be enough to support generations together.

 What was the result?

              Today AliBaba's consumer-to-consumer portal Taobao (similar to eBay) features nearly a billion products and is one of the 20 most-visited websites globally. Alibaba Group's sites account for over 60% of the parcels delivered in China.                 

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

  

                Organizations, just like individuals, have their own personalities—more typically known as organizational cultures. Understanding how culture is created, communicated, and changed will help you to be a more effective manager. But first, let’s define organizational culture.           

 

Just as water is invisible to the fish swimming in it, yet affects their actions, culture consists of unseen elements such as assumptions and values that affect organizational life.

             Organizational Culture encompass the values and behaviours that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization.

Organizational Culture is also called Corporate Culture

Organizational culture includes an organization'sexpectations,experiences,philosophy, andvalues that hold it together. It is expressed in its self-image, inner workings, interactions with the outside world, and future expectations. It is based on shared attitudes, beliefs, customs, and written (sometimes) and unwritten rules that have been developed over time and are considered valid. 

                   There are various types of organizational cultures. We discussed a few of them in class. I am listing them below:

1. Open Culture - One where employees are motivated to voice their values-driven concerns regarding problematic business practices. An open culture helps to counteract any occasional lapse into passivity at the board level or on the part of institutional investors.

2. Safety Culture - One where safety is  ALWAYS first no matter what the cost. A safety culture is one were all employees are proactive in ensuring safety at work place. People immediately report any perceived short comings in the work place safety and in the safety of products given to customers or clients.

3. Quality Culture - A culture where utmost importance is given to the quality of the product or service being rendered. Volume takes a back seat. So does cost. Batch recalling of cars/computers when defects are found is a good example of the quality culture. Toyota is a notable example.

4. Performance Culture - We could also call this OUTCOME ORIENTED CULTURE.  This is one that emphasize achievement, results, and action as important values. A good example of an outcome-oriented culture may be the electronics retailer Best Buy. Having a culture emphasizing sales performance, Best Buy tallies revenues and other relevant figures daily by department. Employees are trained and mentored to sell company products effectively, and they learn how much money their department made every day.

5. Ethical Culture - A culture where great importance is given to ethical business practices and this importance is seen at all levels in the organization. We see that in such organizations, ethics are given precedence even if being so may lead to a loss of business and profit. The TATA Group is a good example to note.

There are three aspects to organization culture, namely :

         (a) It is something that is practised by MOST of the people in an
              organization.

         (b) It is something that is practised MOST of the time.

         (c) It is something that is DEEPLY believed by the employees.

Many thoughts about organizational culture came out in class. I am finding it a little hard to organize them into meaningful sentences and paragraphs. Therefore, I am giving these thoughts in point-wise form without any specific order or precedence. The various point we discussed where:

1. Organizational Culture leads to enhanced performance.

2. Organizational Culture is an important motivating factor.

3. Organizational Culture is depended on the type of structure which the
    organization follow. Flat Organizations have a different structure from more
    Hierarchical ones.

4. Organizational Culture is not STATIC. It changes from time to time.

5. Organizational Culture is invisible.

6. Organizational Culture is usually inferred. There is no book from where to read
    about it.

7. Organizational Culture - usually - is not documented. It is separate from the
    rule book. In fact, we could argue that if culture were to be written down then
    it would lose its impact.

8. Organizations can have multiple cultures of sub-cultures.

9. Organizational Culture can be WEAK or STRONG.

This sums up the entire learning for this class. More in my next blog post!!!! 

Navrang Cube !!!

Navrang Cube.... The Management Funda

NAVRANG CUBE is a simple playing cube composed of 27 identical cubes of 9 different colours ( 3 cubes of same colour) . The cube has hole in 5 sides and a connector in one side so as to hold on the other cube. When seen , it resembles like the Rubic cube but is very different in nature and composition . All the 27 cubes in this can be disassembled . The main motive of this cube is to make a Bigger cube with no two same coloured cubes in same side of face.....

for those who have not tried this fun yet or those who doesn't have this cube at home.. for them I have come up with this flash player game.
                                                               <<<<navrang game online>>>>

                  NAVRANG CUBE AND MANAGEMENT

When we solve NAVRANG cube , we get into the problems faced and try to solve them. Literally speaking we try to fit every colour into one side of the face of the NAVRANG. As the different cubes are arranged in single face of NAVRANG , so in case of an Organisation every individual is assigned a proper job and function to deliver. Any blocks misplaced will effect the whole NAVRANG , so the same case happens in organisation also. If a person doesnot perform his duty timely and efficiently , the organisation may not work.
As the colours of the rainbow or here the NAVRANG Cube each strata or division of an Organisation should be made up of different types of people so that the organisation structure is holistic and multidimensional. 

So for an Organisation to work efficiently , all the persons should work in their specified divisions without any clashes. This will make the organisation look like NAVRANG Rainbow .

World without Poverty !!

Mohammad Yunus: A Messiah on the Holy Earth

This time we were assigned to watch a video  Muhammad Yunus.
The video Lecture by was a guest.About what made Muhammad Yunus to come up with the idea of a Grameen bank and how did he Pursue his dreams.
The video was an eyeopener for us, and with a session of Dr Mandi, The impressions of the idea has got deeply engraved into our minds.

Muhammad Yunus is that rare thing; a bona fide visionary. His dream is the total eradication of poverty from the world. In 1983, against the advice of banking and government officials, Yunus established Grameen, a bank devoted to providing the poorest of Bangladesh with minuscule loans. Grameen Bank, based on the belief that credit is a basic human right, not the privilege of a fortunate few, now provides over 2.5 billion dollars of micro-loans to more than two million families in rural Bangladesh. Ninety-six percent of Yunus's clients are women, and repayment rates are near 100 percent. Around the world, micro-lending programs inspired by Grameen are blossoming, with more than three hundred programs established in the United States alone. Banker to the Poor is Muhammad Yunus's memoir of how he decided to change his life in order to help the world's poor. In it he traces the intellectual and spiritual journey that led him to fundamentally rethink the economic relationship between rich and poor, and the challenges he and his colleagues faced in founding Grameen. He also provides wise, hopeful guidance for anyone who would like to join him in ''putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long.'' The definitive history of micro-credit direct from the man that conceived of it, Banker to the Poor is necessary and inspirational reading for anyone interested in economics, public policy, philanthropy, social history, and business. Muhammad Yunus was born in Bangladesh and earned his Ph.D. in economics in the United States at Vanderbilt University, where he was deeply influenced by the civil rights movement. He still lives in Bangladesh, and travels widely around the world on behalf of Grameen Bank and the concept of micro-credit.

                                              

In 1972, Yunus returned to Bangladesh after eight years as a student and professor in the US and became a professor of economics. He had no intentions of becoming a banker. Bangladesh had been devastated by its War of Liberation and a famine followed shortly thereafter. In his autobiography and again in an interview with me, Yunus has told me how the faces of silent starving people haunted him, and his economic theories seemed like fairytales, totally useless (Yunus, 1999; Interview, 2010). He wanted desperately to be helpful. In the nearby village of Jobra, he set up a cooperative with farmers and landowners to grow rice more efficiently. The yield at the end of the season was high but he discovered the farmers had robbed him of his share of the profits.

Seeking another way to help the poor, Yunus took groups of his students and colleagues for numerous field trips to Jobra to learn about poverty. One day he lent some small amounts of money, less than twenty-seven dollars in all, to forty-two impoverished villagers. To his surprise, they paid him back. He discovered over the next months and years that not only do the poor pay back their loans even without any collateral, but also they pay back at rates far higher than the 60% rate that was typical of commercial banks. This was the defining moment for Yunus (Yunus, 1999). He had found a practical way to help.

The early years of his organization were rocky. In spite of Yunus' impressive results, none of the bankers in the region would help Yunus expand his experimental project. They just didn't believe Yunus' reports or his numbers. Eventually, in 1983, after years of negotiating with skeptical bankers and haggling reluctant government officials, the Bangladesh government recognized his organization, now called the Grameen (village) Bank as an independent bank.

Yunus turned conventional banking practices completely upside down. Not only did he lend to the poor with no collateral, which was unheard of, but also, when he discovered that women used loans to improve the situation of their family more often than men did, he focused on lending to women. When he started out, only 2% of bank borrowers in Bangladesh were women. In the 1980s, women in Bangladeshi villages spent their lives in the confines of their family compounds and many had never even touched money.
As the years passed, Yunus succeeded in attracting women so that today 98% of the Bank's borrowers are women. Locating his
branches in remote villages, he brought the bank to the people rather making them travel to the larger towns and cities.

Other banks lent to individuals but instead Yunus required borrowers at Grameen to form peer support groups and to use their loan for a small business. At first Yunus thought all the borrowers in a group should be in the same kind of business. From trial and error, Yunus learned that groups of five worked better than ten and that having a mix of different kinds of businesses in each group was more productive than single business groups.

Lessons from Muhammad Yunus about Leading Long-term Change

1.  Set forth an inspiring vision and stick with it.
2.  Innovate. Challenge the prevailing wisdom.
3.  Build a team that owns the dream.
4.  Communicate. Relentlessly communicate within and beyond the organization.
5.  Be Flexible. Change strategies, goals, and tactics as needed.
6.  Be patient and persevere. Sometimes you have to wait.
7.  Embed your values into the organizational culture.
8.  Brand yourself and your organization.

The power of Teamwork

Every manager knows the power of Teamwork. In fact the very existence of a manager can be attributed to the phenomenon of 'Teams'. If human beings had long decided to do every task individually, the world would have been a totally different place. The Valley Crossing exercise purely focused on learning this phenomenon called 'Teamwork'.

Explanation of valley crossing through this picture:

Learnings from this exercise:

 Concept of Super Teams & Self Manager Teams: Super Teams or High performance teams is a concept which has been successfully adopted by many big corporations like GE, Krafts food, Boeing etc. It can be defined as a group of 3 to 30 workers drawn from different areas of a corporation to solve problems faced daily. The valley crossing exercise had many characteristics of a super team like:

• Participative leadership – different from the tradition approach of a authoritarian team leader.

• Open and clear communication – Communication is the key to crossing valley effectively.

• Mutual trust – Every person needed to trust each other completely especially when their feet was off the ground.

• Managing conflict – dealing with conflict openly and transparently and not allowing grudges to build up and destroy team morale

• Clear goals – The goals were clear, defined and each member in the team fully understood the gravity of the problem.

• Defined roles and responsibilities – each team member understands what they must do (and what they must not do) to demonstrate their commitment to the team and to support team success. Furthermore the roles and  responsibilities keep on changing depending on the situation. 

• Coordinative relationship – the bonds between the team members allow them to seamlessly coordinate their work to achieve both efficiency and effectiveness

• Positive atmosphere – an overall team culture that is open, transparent, positive, future-focused and able to deliver success.

 Task Interdependence - It is the extent to which a group's work requires its members to interact with one another. We see that in the valley crossing exercise it is of utmost importance to be interdependent on each other so as to mitigate the risk and achieve the task at hand. This also has brings lot of perspectives to the Team performance in reality. What I have observed is that the interdependence increases as we go higher up the corporate ladder. As a worker or low level employee, we can usually get away with completing the task without much interdependence (even though effectively using the team's collective strength may increase productivity). But as we go to strategic level, it is almost impossible to go about a task without the expertise/skill/opinion of your team mates.  Thus Interdependence and its effective usage is crucial for a manager.

Responsibility

Everybody in the organization is equally responsible, no matter if he/she is the higher manager, manager or the engineer/ worker. Because if suppose engineer will not be able to do his job properly then not only he will be in the risk but there is the chance that the manager and the higher manager will be also be in the risk. And finally the task will not be completed.

Trust

The organization cannot be successful if there is no element of trust in it. As in the case of valley problem, persons can take the risk to cross the valley only since they trust the other two. Similarly for the organization to be successful, managers and workers have to follow the Theory X which tells the people or managers have trust on the other people or employees.

Communication

When working in a team, communication will need to be established. If a team can't communicate - it can't and won't work. In a team, there are lots of different individuals from different walks of life, being brought-up in different environments. The individuals of any team will have varying personalities, and so working in close proximity with these different characters will get you used to how to communicate with them. Working in this environment will help to round-off and develop communication.

Excellence

This is the product of efficiency and effective. It’s the prime aim of any management process. Doing right thing is effectiveness. Here three members crossing the valley, if universally people hail this as the best method then it is called effectiveness. Lesser effort the 3 members put in, lesser time spend with in which they could achieve their goal is an indication of efficiency.

Simple Design: The beauty of the system lies in its simple design.

Uniformity of roles: Similar roles for all 3 individuals. There is no differentiation among person 1, 2 and 3. In fact their tasks are designed to be easier, lighter, clearer and more systematic. The members of the group are equally responsible for their contribution to the overall task completion. The amount of risk is also equally distributed among them.