MY MINI EIFFEL TOWER...........................

This is my second blog in series to the earlier one and more insightful and inspirational than the previous.


Dr. Prasad is becoming more and more interesting in his fundae and I want to discuss here one very important concept of Organization and Management. Everyone has heard the words like CRAFTSMANSHIP and ORGANIZATION but I am very sure that no one has ever been delved into the details of these terms.

What is an organization??? Can craftsmanship be categorized as management?? Does one person constitute an organization?? There are an umpteen number of questions which can be asked at this juncture but I am sure after reading this blog, there wouldn't be an iota of doubt in the minds of readers.

Dr. Mandi is becoming  mysterious day by day in his teaching philosophy and till the end we were on tenterhooks that what would happen in our class. Same thing happened in our today's lecture when we came to know that Craftsmanship involves a negligible management and one person can hardly form an organization. Whatever one does, one does it for his/herself. One does not require a management to perform a task individually. Sounding awry !!!! I want to quote a wonderful example of his that a person who mends shoes at the roadside doesn't know the nitty-gritty of management. Moreover, s/he is not conversant with the jargons of management such as scalability, sale, performance, time management, targets etc. Then Prof. Prasad explained that a person starts as an entrepreneur and later on enhance the scalability to the level of organization, where the organization and management terms come into play. A person at the lower level of scalability is highly satisfied compared to a person at higher level of scalability. However, one can also achieve the same level of satisfaction while talking of an organization.

The second concept is regarding the making of an organization which was beautifully demonstrated by Dr. Mandi. The task was comprised of building the tower (as high as possible) with the wooden cubes. Then out of the blue a question was asked by him .Who wants to build the tower??? And as usual the silence prevailed................
 

A still from second lecture

                                        

And later on a proper bidding happened for this task. Meanwhile , when everybody was reluctant to come forward then a new learning came out regarding the attitude of all spectators ( more precisely , SILENT SPECTATORS ).We were just showing our risk averse behavior which could be detrimental for us to be a manager. Finally, the bidding ended at the price of Rs. 500. The next question aroused : How tall tower one can establish?? Again everyone set their target low. Mr. Prasad told us that setting a low target would make every one satisfied early in their life and a high target would make us work more and grant us an opportunity that will push us to our extreme limits. But I think there are some exceptions to the concept of " HIGH RISK HIGH RETURN " strategy. Many people believe that setting lower expectations and later on delivering higher outputs is better. But we can say that the matter is subjective and requires a further discussion which would be out of the purview of this blog............ 

Then came the bottomline of the whole lecture with a task which was performed last , when our professor asked a team of eight people to collectively build the tower with only one person (blindfolded) building the tower and second person dictating him and rest of the people are suggesting from behind. This scenario can be suitably matched with the working of an organization having a huge middle tier of mangers. What happened at the end .......any guesses?????

                                      

A Confusing Situation

                                       

Contrary to what was expected, they were not able to build a huge tower. The main setback for this was the overdose of suggestions from the six people( acting as "middle level mangers") who rather confused the person ( acting as a "worker" in an organization) who was building the tower. Prof. Prasad told that an overly managed organization should cut down the size of its middle tier managers and move toward FLAT organizational structure to become more effective because there is always a problem for any organization to justify a huge bunch of middle managers where as it is relatively easy to manage workers.


These are some useful learnings from the second lecture of our professor. Stay tuned for more.........