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