Learn from the Idiots

This session of Dr.Mandi was about "THREE IDIOTS". Please don't mistake it to the  Amir Khan entertainer. Let us see what this is all about.

Sir, demonstrated this whole story in class with the help of three of my classmates. Three people have to cross a valley which is more than one step of the member and less than two steps. They have a long rod with sufficient length. They attempt to cross the gap with everyone holding on to the rod. As soon as someone is on the gap, he would hang from the rod and the other two members would take his weight. This way they can cross the gap. Also it must be noted that load distribution was effectively managed. Also, the role of one will depend on the role of another.

Why does this story teach us?

Team Work

                       Teamwork is absolutely necessary while carrying out any task. It helps the manager and the organization as a whole to achieve targets. It cannot be possible for a single person to handle everything. It is the teams effort which matters in the long run. Also in the above task team effort was necessary to a large extent. Hence team work plays a pivotal role in management.

  

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. As I'm sure you know, what may be okay to say to one person may not be appropriate to say to another. Working in this environment will help to round-off and develop communication.

Trust

 

This is again a very important factor. Whenever a manager assigns a task to his employees he definitely has a faith in them. This faith encourages the employees to work harder because it gives them a feeling of consideration. This particular thing is showcased very well in the above task. The person hanging in middle has to have complete faith in his teammates about their ability. Only then can a goal be achieved

Togetherness

 

 

Being part of a group where good team management is present will mean that tasks will be fairly and evenly distributed to all team members. When this is done, team members will feel like they are properly a member of the team, and when a team achieves what it sets out to achieve, then this feeling will only increase.Also, by not being sidelined, there is a good chance that your confidence levels will increase as you are being treated equally alongside everybody-else in the group.

 

These are some of the lessons that could be learnt form the story.  Thank you.

 

 

 

 

Tower Building exercise for managerial enlightment & SMART goal setting

Tower Building

            Dr. Mandi gave us a set of small wooden blocks. With this we have to create a tower as high as we can build. He laid out some rules to this exercise such as.

• Only one person should touch the cubes. 
• The tower levels should be made of only one block.
• The exercise gets over at the first instance when the tower falls. 

Apart from explaining us about goal setting in a practical manner. He made us set mission and vision of our own tower building company. With this he made us understand how the organization is built from the scratch.The role of middle managers in modern management was explained. He also explained the difference between organization builders and craftsman by using the tower exercise in two demonstrations. One was where the tower was built by a blindfolded person supported by instructors and the other one was the building by a single person(craftsman).

 
This exercise was all fun and full of learning.

Dr. Mandi lecture was about setting goals. This he explained to us using a very interesting activity using small toy blocks. First of all, let us see what  SMART goal setting is.

 

SMART GOALS	Are Defined As	Other Representations of S.M.A.R.T. Goals
S	SPECIFIC	(significant)
M	MEASURABLE	(meaningful)
A	ATTAINABLE	(achievable) (action)
R	RELEVANT	(realistic) (rewarding)
T	TIMELY	(tangible) (task oriented)

You can understand this even more about SMART goals by watching the below video by Arina Nikitina

Dr. Mandi made each one of use do this (to set a SMART) goal regarding the tower building exercise.In this four criteria were given to us in respect to this tower exercise The numbers in the criteria is the height of the tower.

1. Goal set
2. Goal achieved
3. Tower record
4. Tower potential

In this case we discussed about each one of them and came to a conclusion that. The potential is always the sky. There is no limit. So consider 4 as infinity.

4 > 1 > 3 and 2.

This conclusion gave us a better picture about goal setting and that too setting it in a SMART manner.

The Chinese Folktale and its management teachings

              Dr. Mandi, as part of our course activity asked us to watch and understand the Chinese folktale : Three monks. The  Three Monks is a Chinese animated feature film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. After the cultural revolution and the fall of the political Gang of Four in 1976, the film was one of the first animations created as part of the rebirth period. It is also referred to as The Three Buddhist Priests.

The story revolves around three monks who come to a temple on top of a hill to do service to God.

The first monk arrives at a temple built on the top of a hill. The monk used to lead a simple life, meditating, tending to his vegetable garden and fetching water from a cold stream.Everyday he used to get two buckets full of water from down the hill and carry them back to temple using a shoulder pole Rain or shine, he never used to miss a day lugging this burden up the mountain to the temple. The water he got was more than enough for one person.

One fine day the  second monk visited the temple and started living there. The second monk happily took responsibility to fetch water. The first monk tried to act smart by putting all the burden on the second one thereafter. One day the  monk got aware of the first monks ill thoughts and

refused to do it alone. therefore they decided to share the responsibility but the shoulder pole was small and could accommodate only one bucket then.The water they got was still enough for both of them. 

Later a third monk came to stay with them. As soon as he came, he drank all the water and there was no water left in the jar. The short monk and the tall one asked him to fetch water by himself. He carried a bucket of water, and drank it up immediately. From then on, nobody would fetch water, so they had no water. Everyone chanted his own mantras and knocked his own wooden fish. As nobody would add water to the holy water bottle, the plant in the bottle withered soon. At night, a mouse came out stealing, but everyone pretended not to see it. As a result, the mouse was so rampant that it knocked over the candle holder and caused a fire. Only thus did the three monks make a concerted effort to put out the fire, and finally awaken. After that, they started hanging together forgetting the animosity among them and came out with an ingenious idea to fetch water where one monk would fetch the water from the river into the bucket, the other would pull it up through a pulley arrangement and third monk would then receive the water for storage and handover the second bucket. This greatly improved the productivity.

Finally all the three monks got together to fight the fire and started working together to get the water every morning and no one suffered from thirst thereafter.

1.Team Work

                  This is the most obvious lesson learnt form the story. The three monks in crises statrted to work together and reaped benefits which they were not able to do alone. I am able to relate this to a situation that happened on my office where the post-production team was struggling to get the work done when they were overloaded after an exhibition. At this time the management decided to indulge every one available to engage in this work by teaching certain easy concepts to them. Thus the work was split and end result was achieved well within the due date.

                                2.Technology and Innovation
                       Eventually, when the pulley came into action the monks were able to pull off the work more easily. This reflects the significance that technology and innovation can have on any current working system.


3. Right resources at the right Place 
                     The idea to use the monks at the right place according to their strengths was an important decision to make the whole process more efficient. For example the fat monk was used at the bottom so he will drink the water from the pond when he is tired after working and the reserve at the temple will remain in tact.


                     The monk story helped me understand the effects that good planning and management can have on any result . I hope this has helped you too. Thanks for reading.

 

  

 

Craftsmanship Vs Modern Management

                               

            

              

                 Vs

Dr.Mandi gave us insights about the  arts of craftsmanship and modern management. Let us understand in principal what these two are.

What is craftsmanship?
                    A craftsmanship is all about one person performing all the activities in an occupation. The craftsman is very skillful and dextrous in the occupation that he does. His legacy stays with him.

What is modern management?
                    Managing to build an organization is all about bringing people together, sharing work among themselves and working at a very large scale towards a common goal.

Let us try and see how these two arts differ from each other

	Craftsmanship	Modern Organizations
1	It is centered around the single craftsman	It operates around a huge number of people
2	Non parallel process	Parallel process
3	Less Dependency and greater accountability.	More inter- dependent and less accountability.
4	Person oriented	Process oriented

With this understanding Dr.Mandi talked about the need for budding mangers to have the vision  to look at the bigger picture and motivated us to be up and ready to take up the challenge of building such big organizations in future.

How we are going to do this is what we are going to learn in organization management. With respect to this one important concept was discussed.

The 3E's of Management

 # Efficiency
         Efficiency can be given as doing things in a right manner. This can be done by fine tuning the process that we do.

 # Effectiveness
         Effectiveness is doing the right things. This is the challenging part. As managers we have to be making certain decisions to make sure that effectiveness is accomplished. 

# Excellence
        Excellence is achieving more out of less for more.

                                   

                                       "Excellence = Effectiveness x Efficiency"

 

 Thank you for reading. I wish all the very best to you to achieve excellence in your quest in life.