Day5: The Pygmalion Effect

The class started with passing on of a two-coloured straw cube and a small snail dummy.  The first question sir asked was: “ Can anyone explain what (a+b)² mean using this cube.  Few of us tried and succeeded, he then asked for (a+b)³ only a few could explain. The idea behind this was to explain how to use a simple cube to explain so many things and thus could be sold easily provided we know how to use it. The next was the snail dummy, he told us the story of Economic Times and how they expanded spirally. He talked of exponential growth and Fibonacci Series. Then he jumped on to performance of employers, he quoted a famous theory called Pygmalion effect. Let us discuss Pygmalion effect in brief here:

Pygmalion Effect:

In relation to management, Pygmalion Effect states that if Higher expectations are placed on people they are bound to perform well. But this happens with only a set of people i.e. a specific relationship eg. Mother-child, Teacher-student, captain-players, performer-audience.

Another example of the Pygmalion effect is in groups. If there are two groups, one group thought that their teacher was "good", the other group thought he was "not good". The teacher treated both groups the same, but the group with a positive expectations had better outcomes than the others; Simply because those with positive expectations made them perform better than other students.

The Pygmalion effect is also an important instrument in management theory. It makes managers be aware, that the success of their employees depends not only on qualification, personal qualities or working environment. Manager always has to believe in his people and expect them to achieve the best results. In such case the subordinates will always feel this trust and demonstrate their best skills and abilities in their work.

Using Pygmalion Effect to achieve higher goals:

As discussed in last blog,

Goal Set X Goal Achieved = True Potential

Now we can use Goal Achieved to positively affect the Goal set and vice versa, taking a day-to-day example that whenever we win a competition our expectations for the next event also increases that is goal achieved enhances our goal set, in the similar way our goal set also enhances our goal achieved provided we take the appropriate steps:

• Our Goal Set should always be greater than our last goal achieved
• Our Goal Set should also be greater than our set potential i.e. how much capable we consider ourselves to be
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• Our Goal Set should also be greater than the Historical Record of the goal, as it would motivate us to set a new record

Thus in this way if we raise our expectations our performance would definitely improve.

Here is a video demonstrating the same:

Day4: Goal Setting and Goal Achieving

“Management is Delivering results” but moving the level of business things starts turning more complex, a lot of work needs to be done in a limited time, analysis needs to be done before setting a goal.

Thus we need to prioritize, in all we need to act SMART.

By smart we mean:

 S  =  Simple, Specific, Sustainable

M = Measurable, Motivating              

A  = Achievable, Ambitious

R  = Realistic, Rational, Relevant, Result-focussed

T  = Tangible,Time-bound

The very first step to achieve success in a business is setting a SMART goal, the goal which aligns to our vision, which is achievable, which is rational and tangible and above all should be in consonance with all the above qualities i.e. S = M = A = R = T

 That is performance would only become reality if our choice is a product of S M A R and T

Considering the tower building example from the class:

Here are the two samples from two Tower Making Companies:

Goal Setting	20	25
Goal Achieved	16	27
Goal ( Historical)	27	27
Potential	-	-

The reason for not writing anything in Potential is that we actually cannot quantify the true potential, although at best we could gauge a range of true potential but that again would be slightly subjective.

But, in order to progress we need to realize that practically goal set is not set to achieve it is set to motivate us to be optimistic, as setting high goals and striving hard to achieve them would make us move closer to our true potential

GS x GA = TP

Taking the same example of tower building, those who targeted modestly like 17 or 20, were focusing more on rationality than on ambitions, thus the consonance of SMART gets disturbed and making the motivation level modest and negating their true potential. On the opposite side, if the goal set is highly optimistic like 50 or 75, then also it disturbs the equilibrium by making it less rational and more ambitious.

Day3: Three Es

Day3: Efficiency and Effectiveness

The discussion started from where it was left off, comparision between craftsmanship and modern business management. Pointing to the indicator in a car example once again, a small fraction of the long chain is assigned to a person in modern business management, this thing does not allow him to view the larger picture in general, he only takes the responsibility of his own work aloof from how that would be utilized exactly for the companies growth and how that is aligned to the company’s vision and mission. On the other hand a typical craftsman would avoid confiding his skills to rest of the world, he just wants to keep it in a black box so as to make himself irreplaceable. Moving on from this , Prof Mandi started with the three Es of Modern management:

 Efficiency: The quality of being efficient, formulated as inputs required to generate the outputs. It is about the way in which work is completed. It can be summed up as “ Doing things rightly”.

Effectiveness: Effectiveness can be explained in terms of what is achieved. It is about whether targets are met or not. Performing effectively means that the right work is being completed. It can be summed up as “ Doing right thing at right time”.

Excellence: The state, quality or condition of excelling; superiority, it is the right mix of the efficiency and effectiveness. A company’s progress is rightly measured by its excellence in the field.

Thus, Excellence = Effectiveness x Efficiency

Qualitatively, effectiveness is the direction in which working should be done to maximize excellence; efficiency is the speed to perform. Effiectivenss is very difficult to achieve and leaders for this are few Efficiency part is much easier to achieve

More out of less, less out of less for more: Excellence

Comparision is effectiveness for more more and more

When you are expanding for more you are not exploiting the workers and when you grow effectiveness becomes more important.

We can solve efficiency, for effectiveness we cannot say that.

Skill and Deskill: Lets understand this via and example, movie making earlier was a skill now it is not a skill due to decentralization of skills i.e tasks now are distributed and responsibility is more distributed thus making people focus only on doing their job without understanding the entire scenario as a whole.

As we could see in the above model interdependency is much higher, S cannot work until C performs his task. But actually there is also independency in their separate tasks. That is no one else could interfere in S’s work. People assume their internal working as a black box producing the desired results which is exactly similar to the way a craftsman work.

But breaking a task into so many steps and assuming to get mastery after a while in every section has an inherent flaw in it. Breaking down the task into much smaller elements ends up making it more mechanical leaving no space for innovation.

Let us understand this by taking an example of going to a reputed restaurant and a local dhaba. In a reputed restaurant there would a special person appointed to do a particular job , a team of specialized chefs to make the most exotic dishes, specialized performers to entertain, well trained waiters etc., while in a local dhaba there would hardly be two or three persons doing the same job. Here, the work is suitably divided with a hint of parallelism, such that, if one person fails on a job, the whole shop won’t suffer. By contrast, if you consider all of these tasks being done by one single person, the level of dependency on him reaches a whole new level. In essence, there’s no person-based but process-based work involved in modern management.

Towards the end of the session, but this time there was also a bid to become the CEO of the project, a mid level manager and a worker but due to shortage of time the activity was postponed to the next session.

I think some part of the movie "Modern Times" shows how a craftsman work in a mordern business world 

TAKE AWAYS from the session:

·         Essential difference in the working of a craftsman and a businessman

·         Specialisation, its pros and cons

·         3Es of management

·         Complexity of management 

DAY2: Craftsmanship and Business Management

The lecture started with distribution of dices, and with bidding for tower-building from those dices, Anvesh Cippali quoted the highest and fetched the chance to build the dice tower. Keeping every dice patiently he managed to keep 16 dices on intact and avoided going further. Prof. Mandi’s conclusion on this was: Doing a business like this is identical to Craftmanship, once you have reached an optimum limit you refrain from going further, thus such business cannot grow. Also he clarified that there is no management in doing such as business as the person is managing things single-handedly or building the tower on a single base.

He demonstrated another such problem, the problem in big firms, when these firms hire people or so to say managers they have to decide a job description for them, most of the times at the initial levels of management people are assigned the task of managing/monitoring the worker class, that is at the very base of the hierarchy there is a worker solving the problem statement and we have a chain of managers guiding him to do the things the ‘right way’. A group of people from our class joined in for this demonstration wherein one person became the worker who was blindfolded and was ordered just to follow the instructions and do accordingly, remaining seven were trying to instruct him on how to do it. We soon found the tower falling on which the working student’s response was: “ Many people were guiding me, I got confused”. On this Prof. Mandi said this is what happens actually in many companies, and the worker class almost everywhere do not want their managers, they already know how to work. He also added that generally in a company the top and the bottom levels have a clear idea of their job profiles but the managers in between have somewhat ambiguous roles to play which many a times make the working class frustrated.

Theory X and Theory Y in managing a comapny:

Theory X

Here management assumes employees are inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can and that they inherently dislike work and thus they need to be supervised every now and then. So, this theory is a bit pessimistic towards employees and appreciate authoritarian rule by the boss.

Theory Y

Here management assumes employees are hard working and self motivated, they love their job and need not require monitoring every now and then. So, this theory is optimistic towards employees and demands independence and self control of them.

Looking at a different perspective, both a manager and a worker can be good or bad depending on their individual personalities, but being good to something could also means being bad at something, i.e. a manager may be pushing employees hard on targets so he is bad for them but for the company he is a good manager as he is submitting the desired output in time. So, let’s try to analyse all the combinations of the workers and managers and see which combination is the best for the industry.

Image Credit: Ishan Verma

Type1: Hful M, GW: Both manager and worker work in tandem to make the company grow exceptionally

Type2: Hles M,GW: Manager puts more burden of workers and doesn’t let them do the work independently, thus frustrating them

Type3: Hful M,BW: Manager is unnecessarily optimistic, he even takes the laziness of the employees in good sense which eventually makes the company run very slowly

Type4: Hles M,BW: Here the employees are not eager to work and the manager knows it, hence he always keeps an eye on them and pressurize them to work

I believe the best combination for the company is Type1 and the worst is Type3.

DAY1: POM course

 The very first class of NITIE IM20 came with a surprise, while we were waiting for Prof. Mehta to come for the lecture Prof. T Prasad joined in as a substitute to him for the day. Prof. Prasad also known as Prof. Mandi due to his well acknowledged initiative in the campus ‘Mandi’. He came in and started passing a few toy like things in the class, no one had any idea what exactly he wanted us to do with them, he just told us to play with them. The first question he asked was how many of us writes blogs, a few raised their hands, and in utter disappointment he delivered his first lesson: “Learn to harness technology for your personal benefit and for the benefit of others in general”. Then he asked another question, the question was: How much are you earning today? Most of us were spellbound as we all left our job to attend the fulltime course here and thus we were earning nothing, he then simply said: “A person who spread hands to others for funding his education is a beggar to me”. Now, he began realizing us how much money we have put at stake for coming to NITIE, he called it opportunity cost, here it goes:

Opportunity cost analysis:
Money lost due to the job ditched = 5Lac per annum x2 years = 10 lacMoney paid to NITIE = 6.52lac
Monthly mess bill =3000 per months x 12x2 =72000
Expenditure on books/accessories = 4000 for two years
Miscellaneous expenses = 50 rupees a day x 365 x2 = 36500
Total opportunity cost = 10lac + 6.52lac +0.72lac +4000+36500 = 1762500= 17.6lac
So, per day cost of studying in NITIE = 17.6lac/(365 x2) =2414 rupees
Thus in order to finance our own education we need to earn roughly 2500 rupees per day. 

But how do we do that, we have to attend regular classes do compulsory assignments and follow many other intangible things throughout the day, how could we manage to take the time out and be optimistic about earning this much amount of money per day. For which he just said “it’s your problem and you have to manage it you are not doing any favour to anybody else by solving it”. We all listed him down so many factors that prevent us from achieving it, like time, money, motivation, mentorship etc. He briefly smirked and asked us how much percentage of time we devoted to studies in our four years of engineering, then he asked how many of us have a business idea, he agreed to listen to our ideas and help us arrange funds and mentorship if we could convince him on profitability of our idea. He pointed to us that we must have the guts to earn money even from the pettiest of the things we have, pointing to the qualities of the toys early given to us, he asked whether we could sell it for four times its worth or not. He tried to remove our mental blocks in relation to becoming self reliant by quoting examples of our seniors who dared to start a company during their NITIE days and eventually ditched the job offers from placements.
                            AAJ KI ROTI, AAJ HI KAMANA HAI!!!

In his second lecture, he started with the punch line of the famous Pink Floyd song Brick in the Wall, “We don’t need to become another brick in the wall we have to live our life independently and should not allow education to limit our thought process/imagination”. He made us listen and sing the song thrice in the classroom, and asked all of us to take pledge of not becoming another brick in the wall, which means we would never limit our job and more importantly our thought process; we would not allow education to dominate our innate common sense and merit. He tried to motivate us towards innovation and usage of technology, saying money can be easily earned channelizing these two things properly. An educated person must sell things at least for four times the money an uneducated could. He asked two students to buy-sell the pink butterfly toy and demonstrated the utility of using innovative techniques and knowledge to sell a product.

“Socho.. Becho !  Becho.. Seekho ! !   Seekho .. Socho ! ! !”

Focusing on the management jargons, he warned us to refrain from using laymen definitions and start using dictionary definitions like:  
Job: Any work that gives you compensation 
Innovation: Purposeful creativity is called innovation
The session ended on a very good note, motivated by him all through the day to think out of box most of us decided to at least give a try on the business ideas that would generate income and employment in the country. We also decided to keep documenting our ideas and learning on blogs so as to make education available for free.