The Bidder ,The Auctioneer, The Scintilla of Knowledge in a Ocean full of Knowledge !

So finally the first session of this subject  is over and believe me this has to be an introductory session of every firm which hire budding managers.

I sincerely regret that I was not able to capture the video of this lecture because I was so indulged in it. Anyways I will try my level best to give you an essence of this session .First of all I want to tell that I was in so much of an awe after the session was over ,of the way Mandi sir took his session .I mean to say that I never ever in my entire student career I came across this type of session where the message is conveyed in such an art full way where you don’t need to open a book ,write down anything and still you think that you have completed the whole encyclopedia of organizational management.

He started the lecture with an exercise of building tower with cubes of similar sizes. He is not shy from asking us to bid for this event  in real Indian currency and it should be in multiple of 100.some smart chaps started the bid with 100 and as a real auctioneer he was able to make us bid till 500.The person who did the bid would have never thought that the more he bid the more chocolates everyone else in the class is going to get. With a fake smile in his face, that he got an opportunity because he bid more, he came in front of class to do that exercise. The exercise was to build the cube tower which I try to describe it with below image.

The smart chap was able to build the tower of 16 cubes which is good by any standard .Then mandi sir asked us the question is it possible to go ahead like this and till how many. Everyone understood that it is not possible to go ahead with this because we understood that it has some limitation because of gravity, weight etc .Then he explained us that this is the problem with any business which is run by craftsmen ,he gave us numerous examples of Idli wala,a shoe maker,a dhobi ,a jewelry shop owner etc. He told that this is not management ,immediately a question came to my mind why this is not management because i thought this is management but it needs to be improvised and i gave an example which can be explained by below image.

But he clarified that this has also got limitation which i understood .so here comes the conclusion that "Craftmanship is not a management"

Wise man say that a good beginning is Job half done, by relying on those i started learning the concept of management and it started with another activity.This time he choose a group of  8 people and gave the same task with some caveats and below are point by point word by word explanation of those.

1.only one person will be making the tower with his eyes closed.

2.every person will be able to talk to the person just infront of him not anyone else.

Below is a pictorial representation of it.

   

The very first obvious question while starting this activity is how many blocks will they able to build as a tower the reply was 15.now the person whose eyes are closed started building the tower one by one and the person just after him is guiding him whenever he was going wrong but other person after him was also giving him suggestions and similar every person standing apart was giving advice to person in front of him and finally he managed it till 10 only.

The learning from this activity are described below.

1. Lot of people are advising each other instead of doing the real work.The solution should have been right in the beginning they must have formed a team of doers,supporters,maintaince work,auditing work,testing work etc.
2. In the first place the assessment should have done according to the skillset of persons.
3. After the tower fell the learnings should have been noted down so that it should not repeat in future.
4. All middle level managers are useless is the notion in industry and for this to change the actual work needs to be identified. 

Here I am pausing this journey for a while ,I will regain my Knowledge and will be back in couple of days.