The Management Tower

Another interesting class on Principles of Organization and management by Dr. Mandi. This time it involved wooden cube toy.Students in the class were asked to build a tower using small wooden cubes.Now as at B-School everyone talks about money,money got involved here too.You will have to bid to compete in the tower building activity.And to my surprise,a person who competed bet 500 Rs. on the same.The Rules of 'Tower Building' Activity were :

• The Tower should have single Cube Base.
• At a time,only one cube could be placed.
• Build tower as tall as you can,but if it falls you lose your money.

The participant of our class was able to make an impressive tower consisting of 16 blocks but his tower fell down unfortunately.

After the activity got over,Dr. Mandi asked us about the Organizational management involved in the activity.Students talked about Time management,Block Balancing,Poor base leads to fall of organizations.

Dr. Mandi then stated the term 'Craftsmanship'.Craftsmen like Cobblers,Carpenters are involved in a negligible Organizational management.The work associated with craftsmanship has no scale. The concepts like Sales,Performance,Results,Bringing new customers,Impact is missing or is negligible with craftsmanship.

A cobbler mending/making X shoes a day is able to satisfy demands of only X customers a day.He does not think of expanding his business and earning maximum profit out of it.rather,if n no. of cobblers get involved in different activities of shoes making,they could make/mend nX shoes a day thereby satisfying nX customers.Their market would multiply 'n' folds.

(Mr.Satyajit Ray was a brilliant filmmaker,but with him went his brilliant movie making techniques and his virual organization.An organization should be process driven rather than being person driven)

Organizational management involves this concept.They bring in a group of people together,define the work and earn as much as profit available by expanding the market by fulfilling large no. of demands.This not only expands the market but also reduces operational costs as no. of tools,time required get reduced.

In another activity,this time Dr. Mandi asked us to show some organizations management in building the same tower.Around 8 volunteers participated in the activity.Some additional rules wee laid down in the activity:

• The team member who would be making the tower is blindfolded.His/Her team members could support him/her.
•  Supporters are not supposed to touch the blocks or the person involved in building it.

Everyone in the class was asked to predict the no. of blocks that could be laid down,I predicted 10.The activity was started,wherein one supporter verbally helped the constructor in placing the blocks.The team laid 7 blocks and the tower collapsed.

The learning from the activity:

1)Set a handsome target:Professor mentioned that always set a target which attracts audience.Had there been investors, corporate,low target would bring severe criticism.You can always take some risks.But at the same time,never set a target which is just out of reach. Realize your potential and instead of lowering it,raise it by same extent.

2)Team Activity V/s Individual:In the second activity,team member was blind folded.The team comprised of 8 members,but members had no specific task assigned.'Blind folded' constructor here signified "over management".The poor performance in second activity was because there were too many managers in the team with no specific role and responsibility,which lead to loss of transparency in the system.This would obviously make work difficult for the constructor.

In the future blog,we would talk more on Craftsmanship and compare it with Modern Management