Dr. Mandi, Session1

Principles of Organization Management. It was the first class of this subject and all the students were waiting for the professor to arrive. Some time later he came and introduced himself. " Hi all. My name is Dr. Prasad. I would like all of you to call me Dr. Mandi".   Because of my "profound" knowledge in Hindi, I immediately asked the guy sitting next to me and found that it means the small temporary shops set up to sell fruits vegetables etc. But that led to the next doubt,"why should some one call himself 'Mandi' ?"

The later I found out that the name was just a tip of the iceberg. After all our introductions, Dr. Mandi started the lesson by the following quotes

"Socho   Becho.… !  Becho Seekho.. ! !   Seekho Socho.. !!!"

"Aaj ka roti ..Aaj hee kamaenghe !
  Behatar padhai kae liye.. Kamai ! !"

He started by talking about the problems of the current education system. He told that current educational system is grossly inefficient in performance, unaffordable  and inaccessible to the many needy people. He elaborated it. The knowledge gained from class rooms are never properly understood and  never utilized properly. Neither the teacher nor the students make honest effort to understand the topic and learn about its real life applications. This makes our education system inefficient. Due this inefficiency lakhs of crores of public money is getting wasted. What all government spends on education is going fruitless since what the students has learned is never is put to use anywhere. This makes our education system unaffordable and inaccessible.

According to Dr. Mandi, students should earn enough to cover up educational expenses from what they have studied. Then only they will understand the value of education and will contribute to the growth of themselves and nation. Astonishingly not even a single student was there in my class who earns themselves for their educational expense. Even me too is in that majority. 

Later he showed a simple cuboid with each of its side made two sticks of different length joined together, such that all the faces of the cubes has two squares and two rectangles.  He asked us to explain what each face of the cube represents. A class containing 70 engineers, who all have scored good percentiles in cat was not able to recognize that it represents (a+b)^2. And the volume of the cube is (a+b)^3. That was a self realization. Even after all this years of studying am I not able understand how to represent (a+b)^2 pictorially. this was the case with most of us. This showed us how inefficiently is our system of education.

He told the story of a few engineering students who earned money to pay for their fees by selling an item. What they sold was a set of pendulums which could demonstrate the principle of transfer of momentum very easily. The theory is pretty simple, which everybody knows, construction is very simple and still no has ever thought of making it. They sold a 10,000 pieces of that.

Only by now I could understand what he has told in the beginning of the  class.

"Socho   Becho.… !  Becho Seekho.. ! !   Seekho Socho.. !!!"

"Aaj ka roti ..Aaj hee kamaenghe !
  Behatar padhai kae liye.. Kamai ! !"

He described the "Mandi" fest, that is held every year in our college. This is where Dr. Mandi is puts into practice the principles told above. I think the video below would give you a small idea of what Mandi is.

 This is where students of NITIE i.e. us are putting to use the lessons in MBA class in real life environment. The students will sell items which are based simple logic, basically of the type which helps the younger ones to learn better on the streets of Bombay. They will learn about basics of marketing strategies, segmentation etc directly from the fields, at the same time generating a considerable amount of money, much more than that was spend for the event.

By the time class ended all of us were eagerly waiting for next "Mandi".

Session 2: Goal Setting

The second lesson was on goal setting. A perfect example of goal setting process is the annual performance management system for appraisal of employees.  At the start of each year, employees is expected to pen down the major performance areas (MPA) against each of which there is an expected midyear and final percentage that is to be achieved. These MPA’s are the goals that employee needs to accomplish. The characteristics of such goals can be summarized in the following acronym.

S.M.A.R.T

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

First, the entire class was asked to take part. After a round of bidding, three of us got the chance to play this game. There were several small blocks. And all that was needed was to stack up these blocks to create the largest tower.  But it is not as easy as you think; it has to be played with certain conditions. The person building the tower should be blindfolded and also he should use his left hand. We were asked to quote the number blocks in the tower.

A few of us quoted less than 15, while the majority quoted it to be between 15 and 20. Finally we agreed upon 18.

Now the task is set and it is time bounded since it has 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.  

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

1.  The Working Executive

2.  The Middle Manager

3.  The Top Management.

The following are a few pics at different stages of work.

 1. Beginning stages

  2. Completed tower

3. Our Team with Dr. Mandi

And our team finally made a tower 18 blocks, thus breaking all the previous records and successfully achieving the mission initially set. But it was not a cake walk as you may think.  The session was really useful in understanding through practical sense the goalsetting process and the effect of all parameters on the vision and mission statement.

While carrying out this task we also learnt about the two theories of management, namely Theory X and Theory Y. 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.

     2. Whereas in Theory Y, management believes that working executive is performing well and no further motivation is necessary for completing the mission.

In the above scenario, the Top management  believed that the person building the tower is performing well and therefore is Theory Y form of management.