POM Lecture_20/06/2012 :

Our first lesson for POM started with several eye catching objects and immense learning with the help of several activities during the class.

• Pink Floyd’s Songs "Another Brick in the wall" : Prof. Dr. Mandi’s words along with this song were really inspiring.

Learning: Current education system is more or less creating xerox copy of each other and students are just being transformed into workforce through education. There is need for right education. We as a student of NITIE should not just mug up the things for passing out the exam but we should learn and apply it in real life.What I feel is We should create opportunity for workforce rather than becoming a workforce.

• MANDI : It is an impressive and unique initiative by Prof. Dr. Prasad.It is an annual event of NITIE which gives platform to the student to learn and implement management concept by selling educational  toys made by NGO “Navnirmiti”on the street of Mumbai.

Learning: As we are spending money to maintain our lifestyle and this is being fulfilled with the help of our parents mainly. As we are investing it today, why not earn it today only and to earn we must know how to sell. Whatever specialization we do in MBA, if we don’t know “Selling”, MBA degree is worth of nothing. The tag line of MANDI “SOCHO BECHO, BECHO SEEKHO, SEEKHO SOCHO” encourages us for the same.

• Goal Setting and Tower building activity:

Our second lesson was on Goal setting. A real example of goal setting process is the annual performance management system for appraisal of employees.  At the start of each year, employees are expected to note down the major performance areas against each of which there is an expected midyear and final percentage that is to be achieved. These performance areas are the goals that employee needs to accomplish and it is associated with the job responsibilities of a particular designation. The characteristics of such goals can be summarized in the following acronym.

S.M.A.R.T.E.R  Goals

We learned the exact meanings of each of them through the “Tower Building activity”.

In this activity, we were asked to build upon a tower with wooden cubes, one upon the other. The challenge was to build the longest tower. Each one of us was asked about the height of tower which we could build, in terms of number of cubes. We all had to run some sort of logic or reasoning or kind of statistics in our mind to reach to a number. About 40% of our class strength came out with the number 15, about 30 % came out with the number 20 and a small number of people said 25 and 30.Somehow range of 15-20 seemed to be the feasible height of the tower. Finally we agreed upon for creating tower with 18 cubes. Several Questions came in my mind during this activity which were answered subsequently.

Now the task was set and it was time bounded since it had to be completed before the end of the session.

Our objective was well defined specific and measurable i.e. try to create a tower of blocks that would contain 18 blocks.  

Now, as the goals were set, three lucky people chosen on bidding were given different responsibilities to carry out the task at hand. One was to build the tower blindfolded and with his odd hand. One should had instruct the blindfolded about the moves as well as motivate him using his interpersonal skills. The third one had to make sure that the entire process was carried out skilfully and effectively. This actually represented the three sets of people in a company.

1.  The Working Executive

2.  The Middle Management

3.  The Top Management

As the activity was in progress, we found all the above 3 roles were being performed in very nice way.Top Management was concerned about the welfare of his men at work along with task completion. The Middle Management was guiding the working executive to complete the task i.e. he was making him available the resources and guidelines to complete the task.Working executive was given break in between to complete the task. With the guidance and encouragement of management, task was completed successfully.

Lesson: The activity shows as work culture is a very important aspects in successful operation of an organisation .The way management handles their workforce and encourages them to achieve the target along with concerning welfare of their employee create an organisation “the place to work”.

Communication is one of the important aspects. If there is any communication gap, it can result into failure of project also. So, bi-directional communication between management to employee should be clear and efficient to achieve success.

When the activity was successfully completed, I realized that It is not impossible to achieve a target if we put in our right efforts at the right time with proper guidance. At that moment, even achieving the target of more than 20 cubes (height of tower) did not seem unachievable. As a manager we need to find out the way to get things done rather than saying NO or IMPOSSIBLE.

While carrying out this task we also learnt about the two theories of management, namely Theory X (“authoritarian management” style) and Theory Y (“participative management” style). Here, in this task the manager overseeing the entire task could have handled the situation in two ways:

     1. In Theory X, management believes that the working executive is not performing well  enough up to their expectations. Therefore the management tries to motivate the working executive to perform more or people can be forced with the threat of punishment to work towards meeting the organizational objectives.

     2. Whereas in Theory Y, management believes that working executive is performing well and no further motivation is necessary for completing the mission. Management thinks people are self driven and they accept and seek responsibility.

In the Tower building activity, the Top management believed that the person building the tower is performing well and therefore it is associated with Theory Y.