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.