If we can dream it,can we build it ?

The  POM class started with a discussion on 3d printing technology and how it is being used in 3d modeling and prototyping. This technology is at a very nascent stage at this moment and very few sectors have learnt and embraced it. A simple prototyping machine would cost you about 50 lakh..!!  Dr Mandi shared with us that few students from our college are working together to take this amazing technology to the reach of engineering students. Some of the students from the class were very keen to contact the students already working on it and know more about it..

The next topic on the table was the Pygmolian Effect. It is a theory in which the greater the expectation is placed upon the people, the better they perform. It can be seen in schools, business, organisations and even in relationships. Surely this helps a lot in raising a child or motivating an employee. But it has its own loopholes :How much ever you expect, you can never expect a cat to act and look like a lion. And obviously not vice versa also!

Expecting a person to achieve –what you want him to- might create pressure on him. And playing under pressure is not recommended. Real life examples include manager-employee, parents-child etc. I can remember how as a teenager, some times I used to fall in arguments with my parents due to their “view” of me and my “experience” of me. But with time, all that has been settled.

Talking of expectations and achievements , we moved on to discuss GOALS and SMART GOALS. In order to achieve something meaningful in a certain period of time ,we need to set goals in order to give us a clear picture of what we are aiming at .Smart goals  have more chance of being accomplished than general goals. 

Even the word “smart” is an acronym for some of the very smart words.

S - specific, significant, stretching

M - measurable, meaningful, motivational,manageable

A - attainable, agreed upon, achievable, acceptable, action-oriented,appropriate

R - relevant, realistic, reasonable, rewarding, results-oriented

T - time-bound, time-based, timely, tangible, trackable

Like a general goal can be “Get in shape” .But a smart goal will be to “Join a gym and workout 3 days a week”.

Dr Mandi explained to us the meaning of the very simple and daily use words –“Continuous growth and evolution” with the help of a snail. Learning is much more of a cyclic process than a linear process. We come across the same set of difficulties many a times. But each time we encounter them, we are at a different level – probably matured –and thus get over them faster.If today we achieve 5,then tomorrow with more experience and learning we will achieve 13,then 35 and this will go on.. This explains the continuous evolving and learning.

To explain goal setting and achieving more clearly, we performed the same tower building exercise, just that this time the students who were making the tower were more in number and also there were no constraints like the blind-fold. Every individual in the class was asked about the height expected out the group. The answers were mostly around 25 -30.The group making the tower had actually set their goal as 50.The record made by the senior batch students was 27.This team aimed to break that record. They could manage building the tower of 28 cubes.

Few Questions to ask:

Should the goal set be always more than the potential?

Should the goal achieved be more or less than the goal set?

Dr mandi cleared these questions with the help of a graph .

A = Goal set

B= Potential

C=Goal achieved

D = Historical Achievement

This simply means that it is better to aim for goals higher than our potential .Then only we will be able to measure our potential and accordingly work to achieve more higher results and success.

The Blind Man's Tower

The last two sessions of POM totally revolved around the “Tower building “ activity. The task here was to build a tower by using wooden cubes of equal sizes. One student from the class was picked up after a lot of bidding J and on the condition that if he is not able to achieve the self estimated target ,he will have to give treat to the whole class .The bidding  amount here was 500/- only.

While the guy was busy building the tower, most of us were watching him and clicking his pictures and shooting his videos. He was doing it with full concentration and with a situation dependent strategy. He successfully made a tower using 16 cubes.

This same activity was performed in the next class but with a variation. This time a team of 8 students was formed .The team members were asked to select one person as a worker who would be blind-folded during the entire activity. There would be one person guiding the blind-folded worker. And the others were made to sit at a distance from the worker as managers. The team was given two minutes to decide their strategy and their height target. No one , except the blind folded worker could touch the tower. The team decided 20 cubes as their target .But unfortunately could manage only 7.

The answers to the below questions can serve the purpose of this activity:

·         Why did the team not succeed in achieving the target?

·         What was the objective?

·         How did the managers communicate to the worker during building process?

·         Was the worker trusting  the managers who were guiding him throughout?

·         What could have been done to improve the tower?

The 8-membered team failed to achieve their target because there was only one man working and 7 people directing him. Each of the seven having different opinions on how the tower was being made.

We can see similar kind of situations in our organizations .A situation where the worker is completely dependent on his manager’s ability to give clear and precise instructions. Sometimes the manager is assertive and but the worker is lazy enough to ignore his instructions .Sometimes the manager is indifferent to the workers  constrains and end up messing the situation by hurrying or shouting at the worker.Well Its rightly told..

                                      “The higher our position ,the more modestly we should behave”

The other aspect of this activity was to drift us from the craftsmanship level to organization level. For any organization irrespective of its size, its ability to excel depends on two things –Efficiency and Effectiveness.

Excellence = Effectiveness X Efficiency

But there is huge difference in the way the traditional craftsmen and the modern organizations work.Craftsmanship is an old concept but it is appreciated in all cultures. In craftsmanship, there is only one man crafting goods but he doesn’t have the knowledge to manage his organization. Motivation to work is solely derived from his paycheck and that is all what the worker cares about. He has to be master in all the processes involved in the production of his product. This makes his production process an independent one and the craftsman a highly skilled one.

But Modern Management is quite different from Craftsmanship. It is different in the sense that this kind of management helps a complex organization function as if it were one craftsman. There are many people working in teams on different levels and in various domains to simplify complex business processes. The division of work has helped increasing the organization’s efficiency but has also led to increased employee dissatisfaction due to the mundane and repetitive nature of work .Most of the organizations suffer from unnecessary and unstructured division of work which leads to confusion at many levels and reduced efficiency. These types of organizations work on the concept of parallelism. It is a process based entity. The various functions of the organization are not dependent on each other, instead are handled by a different manager leading his team. One of other major problems of today’s industrial scenario is “DESKILLING” which involves reducing the skill level of the job or the employee to lower production costs and ensure higher productivity. But I blame some of the humans for this. Humans like me .We want to work for a big organization, maximize our skills, and extract the best price for them. We might be the happiest if our job is being done by the push of a button. It can make life easier. And whether it is the push of a button or any other process that reduces the effort by human, if it makes management easier or lets say less skillful will be welcomed.

The XY Theory

Many of those reading this post are working or having some experience of working in an organization.Some who are  bosses and some working under bosses and some who are both.So this might be relevant to you!

The XY Theory

This theory was given by Douglas McGregor in 1970.His theory is based on human nature and perception of humans by humans. Theory X assumes that employees are inherently lazy,must be pushed to achieve objectives and are incapable of self regulation. Theory Y assumes that the employees are highly motivated,capable of self direction and want to accept responsibility. Most people would describe themselves as being Theory Y. But they feel that their bosses think them to be from Theory X.

 Let us analyse somethings here:

                X                         Y                      

1	2
3	4

              

Good worker

                                                               

                

Bad worker

Type 1 – This situation can act as a slow poison to the organization.This type of work culture leads to degradation of the workers will to work hard.This might affect his performance and make him to develop an indifferent attitude towards the organizations interest and goals.

Type 2 – This situation is the best one.Its wokers are not lazy and are also rewarded by their managers for their hard work.The manager here is hopeful and always motivates his or her wokers.These type of organizations have a veryhealthy work culture leading to on time target achivement by the workers.

Type 3 – This case can be a major cause of concern to the organzations growth .Organizations having such scenarios are not long race players and might fail completely.

Type 4 – In this case the managers might be able to motivate the workers to better performance  by giving them various incentives .This may lead to the smooth working and good performance delivery by the organization.

After carefully analysing ,I feel mine was a boundary line case(Type 1 and Type 3) .While reading about this theory, I also came across a Theory Z.

“Theory Z is not a Mcgregor idea and as such is not Mcgregor's extension of his XY theory.Theory Z was developed by not by Mcgregor, but by William Ouchi, in his book 1981 'Theory Z: How American management can Meet the Japanese Challenge'. William Ouchi is professor of management at UCLA, Los Angeles, and a board member of several large US organisations.Theory Z is often referred to as the 'Japanese' management style, which is essentially what it is. It's interesting that Ouchi chose to name his model 'Theory Z', which apart from anything else tends to give the impression that it's a Mcgregor idea. One wonders if the idea was not considered strong enough to stand alone with a completely new name... Nevertheless, Theory Z essentially advocates a combination of all that's best about theory Y and modern Japanese management, which places a large amount of freedom and trust with workers, and assumes that workers have a strong loyalty and interest in team-working and the organisation.Theory Z also places more reliance on the attitude and responsibilities of the workers, whereas Mcgregor's XY theory is mainly focused on management and motivation from the manager's and organisation's perspective. There is no doubt that Ouchi's Theory Z model offers excellent ideas, albeit it lacking the simple elegance of Mcgregor's model, which let's face it, thousands of organisations and managers around the world have still yet to embrace. For this reason, Theory Z may for some be like trying to manage the kitchen at the Ritz before mastering the ability to cook a decent fried breakfast."

Refer this for details : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_Z_of_Ouchi

@NITIE POM Class 1

The  first class at NITIE turned out to be  a very memorable one. After the document verification and the room alottment process on Thursday ,most of us had gotten a chance to relax and settle down on the weekends.Very enthued for the first B-School class,I reached the classroom five minutes early for a 9'O clock class.It was already 9:20.The class was waiting for the communications Prof to arrive. Little did we know that in the next few minutes we will get introduced to Proffessor Prasad,more famously known as  "Dr Mandi". Most of us had already heard about him and his way of teaching his students. He entered the room with a bag and introduced himself. The session started with him passing the toys kept in his bag to the students. The toys were not so engineering marvels  but were as simple as globe sponge balls, butterflies, a sliding toy employing simple 10th standard physics. What was interesting was that he asked the students to keep throwing around the sponge balls across the classroom while he was talking. The discussion revolved around the importance of earning money by applying the learnings. He asked each one of us to calculate the opportunity cost of joining NITIE. For me, it comes around to be 18 lakhs i.e 2500 per day. :O :O. He stressed on the idea that every individual/student must aim to recover atleast 10% of 2500  every day .In his words , “apni roti,roz kamao”. The crux of the discussion was to  earn some economic value through the application of concepts grasped till date. This is much better explained by these lines

“Socho.. Becho !  Becho.. Seekho ! !   Seekho .. Socho ! ! !”

 There was  a funny act performed by two of my classmates where one was trying to sell the pink colored butterfly to other guy.He had to convince him to take the butterfly at a price higher than the original one.

One of the most entertaining part of the class was when he made a bunch of us sing the song  “Another brick in the wall” . I was hearing it for the first time. The lyrics goes like this..

“We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! teachers! leave the kids alone! 
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.”

Very thought provoking..!!

Dr Mandi  informed us about the activity for the next class –“ The tower building “.All in all the whole session was very practical and productive. I don’t remember myself picking up the pen to make notes. I guess that is the way he teaches. In addition to the concepts given by him , the class was useful to me in one more way. He has asked all of us to maintain a blog of all the management concepts learned and make it interesting by attaching pictures and posting videos of the class .From a very long time, I was thinking of creating a blog. And this is it. My first post!