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.