Principals of Management-2

The second session of our POM class began, and I was thinking that nothing could have topped the fun I had in the first session but I was about to be proven wrong. Dr Mandi came to the Classroom and all of us again sat on the floor as we did in the first session. He started the lecture by giving us some wooden cubes and I was thinking to myself what can we possibly learn from wooden cubes.

The activity was that we had to build a tower using theses cubes, actually two towers. In the first case a person would build the tower and we had to estimate as to how many cubes were to be used to build a tower but there was a catch in the second case, in this case the person building the tower will be blindfolded and another person will be guiding him to build the tower and we had to estimate that how many cubes were to be used in this case.

Most of us estimated that more number of cubes will be used in the first case rather than the second but we were wrong. In the first case 22 blocks were used where as in the second case 25 blocks were used.

The lesson learnt from this is that the first case is of Old management also known as craft management where a single person does the work as well as the decision making whereas in the second case the concept of modern management is used in which the work is done by the worker and the decision making is done by the manager. It was a hard concept to grasp but given below are the various reasons why people have shifted from craft management to modern management.

Parameter	Open Eyed (Old school of management)	Blind Folded (Modern school of management)
Productivity	Less	More
Satisfaction of work	More	Less
Division of work	Not clear	Crystal clear
Skill Set	Skilled	Deskilled
Work quantity	enlarged	Broken in segments

What we learned from this is that in modern times the worker must be kept away from the task of decision making and it is the job of the management. The different levels of management i.e higher, middle and lower management function in today’s times but in case a flat structure of management is applied middle management is the one which is discarded whereas the top and lower management are essential for the working of any organisation.

So it begins……

Finally the dilemma of which B-School to join ended for me when I became a part of the NITIE family. The first thing that I noticed about Mumbai is that the rains just don’t stop here but when I entered the NITIE campus, it was a mesmerizing experience. The serenity of the campus is so overwhelming; no wonder it’s called “GOD’S OWN CAMPUS”.

The date was 17^th June 2013, the big day, the day which marked the beginning of my journey as an MBA student. I crossed 96 different levels of anxiety with each step I climbed, and after a few minutes of furtive glances here and there in Syndi 2 the session started. We were given a lot of MBA GYAN as the first lecture revolved around statistics. Then we were told by almost all the professors what we can expect in the near future: loads and loads of assignments, case studies, projects and presentations.

The second day of the program started just like the first day; everyone rushing to the class, students skipping their breakfast, some students looked as if they had just woken up and come straight to the class. Enter Dr T Prasad also known as Dr MANDI, the person responsible for the famous marketing event MANDI. He kept aside the table and chair and sat on the floor and also called us to sit on the floor, it took a second for me to figure out what all was happening because without a doubt it was a unique experience for me. For the first time in my life I saw toys being used to teach management lessons. 

It was an enriching lecture with him telling us the real meaning of Doing “Dhanda”. He told us about the various aspects of Mandi event. The noteworthy point is that we have learned a lot, gained a lot of knowledge, now it’s time to think out of the box and apply what all we have learned to do DHANDA. It was surely one of the most memorable experience for me and looking forward for more experiences like these in the next two years.