Muhammed Yunus - The legend

          The Grameen Bank is a community development bank started in Bangladesh. They give small loans (known as micro credit or "grameencredit" ) to poor people without asking for collateral.The system of this bank is based on the idea that the poor have skills but have no chance to use their skills without some money, that is their skills are under-utilised. Most of the banks loans go to women.

             The Grameen Bank was started 1976 when Professor Muhammad

Muhammed Yunus at the World Economic Forum

Yunus, a Fulbright scholar and Professor at University of Chittagong, researched how to provide banking for the rural poor. In October 1983, the Grameen Bank Project was made into an independent bank by the government.The group and its first member, Muhammad Yunus, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Grameen Bank is owned by the people who borrow the money, mostly women. The borrowers own 94% of the bank, and the other 6% is owned by the Government of Bangladesh.

                I am embedding the video we were asked see below. Watch it, it's worth your time. It will also give some context to what happened in class and the key learning I had.

Muhammed Yunus Video

                 Our class did not focus solely on aspects of social business. Instead – being a Principles of Management class – we focused on the difference in style of management and in delivery of product. We started out by discussing the difference between a traditional banking system and the Grameen micro-credit system. For the sake of simplicity, I am tabulating the differences below:

		TRADITIONAL BANKING	GRAMEEN BANK
1.	Purpose	Maximising Profit (Profit Motive)	Reducing Poverty
2.	Collateral	Needed. Without which no loans will be given.	No collateral needed
3.	Ownership	Businessmen – Rich People	By the Poor
4.	Loan Amount	Large Amounts	Very Small Amounts
5.	Type of Lending	To individuals	To small groups of people –Solidarity lending
6.	Type of Interest	Usually Interest is compounded	Simple Interest
7.	People Money given to	In most developing countries there seem to be a bias towards men.	Women are the primary focus. In fact women make up 97% of Grameen Bank Customers
8.	Location	Primarily located in urban areas	Primarily located in rural areas

Both Objective and Organisational Structure contribute to another phenomenon – Organisational Culture. Basically, it is the behaviour of humans who are part of an organisation and the meanings that the people attach to their actions. Culture includes the organisation values, visions, norms, working language, systems, symbols, beliefs and habits.

                       The culture at Grameen Bank is to find ways to eradicate poverty. The Managing Director of the bank is not asked, “Why are Profits down?”. Instead he is asked, “How many people have you taken out of poverty today. It is precisely this culture that has allowed the Grameen Bank to achieve so much.

              This is the most important take away from this class. It is the Organisational Culture that motivates employees to perform well. It is the Organisation Culture that affects the way people and groups interact with each other, with clients, and with stakeholders. It is the Organisational Culture that gives the organisation Branding.

Using Navrang's Cube to learn Taylor's Theory of Scientific Management

Learning objective: learn the importance of process management by using a Navrang cube puzzle and critical examination of Taylor’s scientific management theory.

Navrang cube puzzle

It’s a practical demonstration of Taylor’s principle of Scientific Management. Taylor said to improve the productivity Replace working by "rule of thumb," or simple habit and common sense, and instead use the scientific method to study work and determine the most efficient way to perform specific tasks.

To check the gravity of Taylor’s argument, Dr. Mandi came up with this interesting new puzzle in which all students were challenged to arrange 27 cubes of 9 colours and make 1 big cube. The catch lied in the fact that each face should contain all the 9 colours.

Many students tried, performed well to an extent but the outcome was not satisfactory. There was no set process or procedure defined to arrange the cube. Every student had to spend a lot of time in thinking. It may not be a great hitch at individual level, but from an organization’s point of view it’s a disaster. If each individual worker/employee keep on spending so much of thinking time on the same job again and again it will never be productive. It calls for the need of standard operating procedure and deskilling of the process.

On the second phase of the puzzle, Dr. Mandi defined 9 simple steps to arrange the smaller cubes. The process was so simple and didn’t involve any mental work. Then students were invited once again to arrange the cubes and this time there was a drastic change in their productivity. Results were very conspicuous that process planning is the key to increase productivity. This is exactly the same that Taylor claimed. Dr. Mandi was again able to prove his point in his own strange way.

you can read more about Taylor's theory of scientific management from the below link:

Taylor's Theory

Management Lessons Learnt Even Through Three Idiots Crossing a Valley

What? Why??
When several workers come together to achieve a high common goal , thereby giving more significance to collective success over  individual gains, then that is called team-work.

Since prehistoric times, man has been working in teams to realise dreams that would have been impossible for him to go alone.

Ants working in a team

The Situation at The Valley

Team work v/s Individual work

This problem was presented to us in the class while discussing about team-work. The message was self evident and beautifully depicted.
3 people have to carry a payload(a log in this case) and deliver it to the destination. But there is a problem, there is a valley like gap in between where each member has to rely on other two to cross. 
Would this have been possible had it been a single individual? No. 
What makes the difference now? Its the TEAM. Each of the member can now hang on while crossing the valley from the other two and also provides support when his team mates are endangered.


This is how the entire activity will get completed:

Observations:

• Each team member is fully safe once and half safe twice i.e. the risk is distributed.
• All of them will have to safeguard each other when they get into a risky situation i.e. the work is equitably distributed.
• All of them have to ensure instantaneous communication and cooperation to finish the task.

Persons	First Person	Second Person	Third person
Steps
1	Safe	Safe	Safe
2	Half Risky
3	Full Risky
4	Half Risky	Half Risky
5		Full Risky
6		Half Risky	Half Risky
7			Full Risky
8			Half Risky
9	Safe	Safe	Safe

These 3 key points can be applied to any scenario of team-working.

Organisation, Work & Planning

The aim of an organisation is to increase Co-operation and decrease Co- ordination.

We know that management involves Conceptual, Human and Technical Management.

With the confluence of these three aspects, organisations strive to leave a lasting impact on the society.

The 3 concepts around which organisations are created are:

1. Work: Physical organisation of work

2. Authority: Identifying who is the boss. Can be centralized or decentralized

3. Control: Formal and Informal culture of the organisation. Involves standardization, formalities and systems

For these 3 concepts to be implemented, the first step is Planning.

This brings us to the 3 knobs of planning-

• Work Planning
• Authority Planning
• Control Planning

Every manager knows the power of Teamwork. In fact the very existence of a manager can be attributed to the phenomenon of 'Teams'. If human beings had long decided to do every task individually, the world would have been a totally different place. The Valley Crossing exercise purely focussed on learning this phenomenon called 'Teamwork'.

Learnings from this exercise:

1) Concept of Super Teams & Self Manager Teams: Super Teams or High performance teams is a concept which has been successfully adopted by many big corporations like GE, Krafts food, Boeing etc. It can be defined as a group of 3 to 30 workers drawn from different areas of a corporation to solve problems faced daily. The valley crossing exercise had many characteristics of a super team like:

Participative leadership – different from the tradition approach of a authoritarian team leader.

Open and clear communication – Communication is the key to crossing valley effectively.

Mutual trust – Every person needed to trust each other completely especially when their feet was off the ground.

Managing conflict – dealing with conflict openly and transparently and not allowing grudges to build up and destroy team morale

Clear goals – The goals were clear, defined and each member in the team fully understood the gravity of the problem.

Defined roles and responsibilities – each team member understands what they must do (and what they must not do) to demonstrate their commitment to the team and to support team success. Furthermore the roles and  responsibilities keep on changing depending on the situation. 

Coordinative relationship – the bonds between the team members allow them to seamlessly coordinate their work to achieve both efficiency and effectiveness

Positive atmosphere – an overall team culture that is open, transparent, positive, future-focused and able to deliver success.

2) Task Interdependence - It is the extent to which a group's work requires its members to interact with one another. We see that in the valley crossing exercise it is of utmost importance to be interdependent on each other so as to mitigate the risk and achieve the task at hand. This also has brings lot of perspectives to the Team performance in reality. What I have observed is that the interdependence increases as we go higher up the corporate ladder. As a worker or low level employee, we can usually get away with completing the task without much interdependence (even though effectively using the team's collective strength may increase productivity). But as we go to strategic level, it is almost impossible to go about a task without the expertise/skill/opinion of your team mates.  Thus Interdependence and its effective usage is crucial for a manager.

3) The Flip side: Quite often we come across people who get their tasks done by their team mates. One of the flip side of team work is that our efforts may go unrecognised or even worse credited to the wrong person. In a competitive and performance oriented environment like ours, it is important to see through these ploys. Some of the good work practises that I have found in good team players in my previous organization includes:

• Pro actively helping members in need.
• Properly communicating the work done to superiors.
• Pro actively using the teams strength for overcoming problems.
• Effective participation in meetings and team events etc.

These are some of the learnings from this exercise...

Theory X and Theory Y - Is there a winner???

What is it?
Douglas McGregor's 1960 publication which highlighted the concepts of Theory X and Theory Y managers have forever been used to explain the art of motivation based on human behavior.  It encapsulated a fundamental distinction between the different management styles and is a valid basic principle from which to develop positive management style and techniques to propel organisations towards excellence.

Theory X and Theory Y
Organisations consist of employees and managers. The theory delves on the attitude and outlook of managers - the direction and growth of the organisation is in the hands of managers and it is solely their way of managing things which leads to proper motivation of the employees and in the process, achieve growth in the organisation.It is important to note here that Theory X and Theory Y looks into managerial psychology and their way of planning and running the organisation. Thus, it focuses on the class of managers and their behavioral attributes and attitude.

Theory X Managers
His Theory of Motivation states that there is a certain class of mangers who fall in the bracket of Theory X. In this theory management assumes employees are inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can. Because of this, workers need to be closely supervised and comprehensive systems of control put in place. A hierarchical structure is needed, with narrow span of control at each level, for effective management. According to this theory employees will show little ambition without an enticing incentive program and will avoid responsibility whenever they can.

The managers influenced by Theory X believe that everything must end in blaming someone. They think most employees are only out for themselves and their sole interest in the job is to earn money. They tend to blame employees in most situations, without questioning the systems, policy, or lack of training which could be the real cause of failures.

Theory Y Managers
Management influenced by this theory assumes that employees are ambitious, self-motivated, anxious to accept greater responsibility and exercise self-control, self-direction, autonomy and empowerment. Management believes that employees enjoy their work. They also believe that, given a chance, employees have the desire to be creative at their work place and become forward looking. There is a chance for greater productivity by giving employees the freedom to perform to the best of their abilities, without being bogged down by rules.

A Theory Y manager believes that, given the right conditions, most people will want to do well at work and that there is a pool of unused creativity in the workforce. They believe that the satisfaction of doing a good job is a strong motivation in itself. A Theory Y manager will try to remove the barriers that prevent workers from fully actualizing themselves
The following diagram gives a clear explanation about Theory X and Theory Y managers:

Now we further discuss the role of such managers and the effect on employees through the following four cases.


1.)Theory X managers and Employees are lazy :- Theory X manager are those whose inherently feel that their employees are lazy, they lack self-motivation and do not want to work. In this particular case, the development of the organization will slow down as the employees are not given any motivation or incentive to improve their performance.  
 
2.)Theory X managers and Employees are not lazy:-This situation is one of the most dangerous for any organization as the employees who are performing well are not given any motivation to continue doing so. The work culture in this deteriorates highly in the company which may lead to large exodus.

3.)Theory Y managers and Employees are lazy:- Theory Y managers are those who feel that their employees are self-motivated to do the work and are hard working. In this case the managers may be able to motivate the employee to better their performance by giving them various incentives. This may lead to growth of the organization in a due course of time.

 4.)Theory Y managers and Employees are not lazy:-This particular situation is the best for any company to be in. Its employees are not lazy and they are also getting due reward of their hard work and diligence. The mangers feel that their employees are doing good work which lead leads to an overall great working culture in the organization. These organization is able to achieve its objectives and can grow continuously in the long run.

Therefore every organization should try to achieve Scenario-4 which can be achieved by having more Theory Y managers in the firm who can promote good working culture in the organization which will help it to grow.

Be Smart!!!

How Important are Goals for an organization? Imagine a cricket or a football match or any sport for that matter without a goal or a score to be achieved. We watch it keenly so as to see the goals to be achieved. But are organizations equivalent to sport? Well, the fact is Organization play a bigger sport. Effects of a sports match could be seen only on field for some time after it. But Organization reflects society. We can imagine the catastrophic effects that an organization can cause if they operate without goals. It's important for the existence & the purpose organization serves to set goals for it.

Now the question is what kind of goals should organizations have?
How do we know what kind of goals to set? The whole point of setting goals, after all, is to achieve them. It does no good to go to the trouble of calling meetings, hacking through the needs of organization, and burning up precious time, only to end up with goals that aren't acted on or completed. Unfortunately, this scenario describes what far too many managers do with their time.



The best goals are smart goals — well, actually SMART goals are more like it. SMART is a handy acronym for the five characteristics of well-designed goals

• Specific: Goals must be clear and unambiguous; vagaries and platitudes have no place in goal setting. When goals are specific, they tell employees exactly what is expected, when, and how much. Because the goals are specific, one can easily measure One's employees' progress toward their completion.
• Measurable: What good is a goal that one can't measure? If one's goals are not measurable, one never know whether employees are making progress toward their successful completion. Not only that, but it's tough for employees to stay motivated to complete their goals when they have no milestones to indicate their progress.
• Attainable: Goals must be realistic and attainable by average employees. The best goals require employees to stretch a bit to achieve them, but they aren't extreme. That is, the goals are neither out of reach nor below standard performance. Goals that are set too high or too low become meaningless, and employees naturally come to ignore them.
• Relevant: Goals must be an important tool in the grand scheme of reaching one's company's vision and mission. It should be Relevant to the society which it is reflecting and to the employees that it has.
• Time-bound: Goals must have starting points, ending points, and fixed durations. Commitment to deadlines helps employees to focus their efforts on completion of the goal on or before the due date. Goals without deadlines or schedules for completion tend to be overtaken by the day-to-day crises that invariably arise in an organization.

SMART goals make for smart organizations.
Goals are often unclear, ambiguous, unrealistic, unrelated to the organization's vision, unmeasurable, and demotivating. By developing SMART goals One can avoid these traps while ensuring the progress of one's organization and its employees.

GOAL SETTING + GOAL ACHIEVEMENT = PERFORMANCE

Goal Achievement should impact Goal setting positively and goal is not meant to reach ,on the other hand they inspire , motivate to reach them

People pick up on, or consciously or unconsciously read, these expectations from their supervisor.
People perform in ways that are consistent with the expectations they have picked up on from the supervisor.

The Pygmalion effect was described by J. Sterling Livingston in the September/October, 1988 Harvard Business Review. "The way managers treat their subordinates is subtly influenced by what they expect of them," Livingston said in his article, Pygmalion in Management.

The Pygmalion effect enables staff to excel in response to the manager’s message that they are capable of success and expected to succeed. The Pygmalion effect can also undermine staff performance when the subtle communication from the manager tells them the opposite. These cues are often subtle. As an example, the supervisor fails to praise a staff person's performance as frequently as he praises others. The supervisor talks less to a particular employee.

Livingston went on to say about the supervisor, "If he is unskilled, he leaves scars on the careers of the young men (and women), cuts deeply into their self-esteem and distorts their image of themselves as human beings. But if he is skillful and has high expectations of his subordinates, their self-confidence will grow, their capabilities will develop and their productivity will be high. More often than he realizes, the manager is Pygmalion."

Can you imagine how performance will improve if your supervisors communicate positive thoughts about people to people? If the supervisor actually believes that every employee has the ability to make a positive contribution at work, the telegraphing of that message, either consciously or unconsciously, will positively affect employee performance.

And, the effect of the supervisor gets even better than this. When the supervisor holds positive expectations about people, she helps individuals improve their self-concept and thus, self-esteem. People believe they can succeed and contribute and their performance rises to the level of their own expectations.

The Three Monks Story

About the Video

Three Monks is a Chinese animated feature film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. After the cultural revolution and the fall of the political Gang of Four in 1976, the film was one of the first animations created as part of the rebirth period. It is also referred to as The Three Buddhist Priests.
The story of the three Buddhist Monks is an animated film directed by A Da. The film has got many recognition including:

• Won the outstanding film award at China's Ministry of Culture.
• Won the Best animated film prize at the first Golden Rooster Awards in 1981.

It is a short and beautiful movie with a wonderful message. A must watch for managers and practitioners who try to implement working-teams in an organization without looking at the other side of the picture.

Plot

A young monk lives a simple life in a temple on top of a hill. He has one daily task of hauling two buckets of water up the hill. He tries to share the job with another monk, but the carry pole is only long enough for one bucket. The arrival of a third monk prompts everyone to expect that someone else will take on the chore. Consequently, no one fetches water though everybody is thirsty. At night, a rat comes to scrounge and then knocks the candleholder, leading to a devastating fire in the temple. The three monks finally unite together and make a concerted effort to put out the fire. Since then they understand the old saying "unity is strength" and begin to live a harmonious life. The temple never lacks water again.

Watch the video here Three Monks Part I and Three Monks Part II

1 Monk

When one monk descends the mountain and fetches two cans of water at a time everyday to fill up the water, he's enthusiastic but falls asleep in prayer due to fatigue.  Here the entire onus of the work is upon him.

2 Monks

Soon a second monks joins him. Initially the second monk brings water. But later he asks the first monk to join him. While bringing water, each wants to transfer the burden to other monk which leads to disagreement. So they then decide to work together. To avoid unequal sharing of load, the first monk takes out a scale and measures the distance from one end of the pole to center while the other monk marks the distance. The two monks then carry the water with equal effort being applied by the two working as a team.

3 Monks

When the third monk joined , the two monks think of transferring the effort to the new monk. But the third monk, being thirsty and tired, drinks the entire can of water that he bought. This leads to further disagreement.The entire scenario changed when a fire broke out in the monastery. The three monks started working together to save the monastery and succeeded. Disaster occurred and they worked together, but management is not only about tackling disasters. Management should have a foresight and should bring out maximum efficiency even under normal conditions. It should ensure that the team works in coordination to complete the task at hand.

Learnings:

The movie throws light on some important concepts of management:

	One Person	Two Persons	Three Persons
Work Method	Fetching water with two buckets on a pole	Fetching water with one bucket on a pole	Fetching many buckets of water using a pulley system
Tools	Pole, 2 buckets	Pole, 1 bucket	Pulley, rope, buckets
Effort	2	0.5	0.000001
Output	2	1	∞
Efficiency	1	2	∞

1. Process Innovation and Efficiency

Efficiency = Output / Effort

Different processes have different efficiency levels. One of the important functions of a manager is to optimize the process, improve the work design and try to aim for the most efficient process. 

We see that even during the fire, when all the monks were doing extra effort, their efficiency level is not at par with the final solution. This it is important for managers to be thought leaders and try to come up with innovative solutions to improve efficiency. 

 So how do we increase the productivity of a system. The video shows that the maximum productivity resulted when pulley system was used which was an innovative way of fetching water with the least effort. One of the most important tool is thus designing the operation systems.

2. Use of Standard Methods 

When the two monks decided to work together, each tried to transfer the burden to the other. Finally they decided to mark the center of the rod to avoid discrepancy. Initially when they were using their hands, the measurement was incorrect and none of them was happy. So they used a scale which is a standard method of measurement and using this method one of them measured and the other marked making both of them happy.

Even in real life, a manager should use standard methods wherever possible to improve the work methods and to win the confidence of the team.

3. Teamwork

We see a totally new phenomenon that as the number of people increase, the productivity has come down drastically. This is the core learning from this story also:

Without Cooperation, 1 monk can fetch 2 buckets of water, 2 monks can fetch 1 bucket of water and 3 monks will fetch no water at all. 

With cooperation, 3 monks can increase the efficiency of the process to a level previously unattainable. (Innovation, creativity etc plays an important part).

Thus every manager who professes the importance of team work should also look at the flip side and the negative effects by having an imbalanced team.

4. Participative Management

Every individual is different. In the story, there was a thin, a tall and a fat monk signifying different characteristics of people in real life. The final solution which saw the use of a pulley put the individual characteristics of each of them to the best use. The fat monk lifted water from the pond, the tall guy with long legs carried it to the monastery and the short guy poured it into the vessel.

Similarly in real life, no task is good or bad. The role of a manager is to identify the individual strengths of each member of his team and delegate tasks accordingly. He/she should involve each member of his team to attain maximum efficiency.

I hope all of you watch the video and take away important learnings from it.

Happy Reading!!!

Building Blocks of Modern Management

After Dr. Mandi's first lecture, we were eagerly awaiting his lecture to witness his unusual and different way of teaching yet again. And that exactly was how his second lecture turned out to be.

He gave us a situation where one was supposed to build a tower out of small blocks. There would be two different persons assigned to do the task. One would be a normal open-eyed person and the other would be blindfolded. He placed further restrictions on the blindfolded person that he/she could use just one of his hands. But there would be 2 other people helping him/her out to build the tower of blocks. Next, all the students were asked to estimate the height of the tower in the two cases in terms of the number of blocks. The normal guy got votes around 25-30 blocks whereas the blindfolded guy got just 10-15. After that, we were asked to volunteer to do the task by paying money to do it ( Actual bidding was done :) Another way of earning money by generating interest among the participant ;) )

The first guy succeeded in attaining a height of 22 blocks after which the tower fell down. Next was the turn of the blindfolded guy. There were two people to guide him. The blindfolded guy just followed the orders of the other two guys. Surprisingly, he was able to make a tower of 25 blocks which surpassed the height of the open-eyed guy.

We would think that the open-eyed guy is preferable to the blindfolded guy. But modern management goes with an entirely opposite approach. The blindfolded person here represents the workforce which just follows the orders from the higher management without applying their own ideas. The open-eyed person would be creative but could be adulterated and would not be protected from fear and judgement. He decides what he wants for himself. However, modern management wants to remove the decision making part from the doing part. Here's a comparison between the two:

	1 PERSON	MORE THAN 1 PERSON
WORK	Ambiguous	Crystal Clear
SKILL	Skilled	De-skilled
SATISFACTION	High	Very low
WORK	Concentrated and done not very detailed	Enlarged and detailed
TIME	More time needed	Less time needed as work gets divided

In today's times, work is divided as follows:

Work -> Jobs -> Activities -> Tasks -> Elements

Thus in the present scenario, the job of the management is to take high level decisions and delegate the tasks to his team. The management should also motivate his team to extract the best performance from it. Apart from these, the management should be innovative and should come up with new ideas to improve the outcome of the task at hand. For instance the tower building exercise could be improved with techniques like zig-zag tower, a boundary for the tower, etc.

There were many lessons taken from the tower building exercise. And there are many more to come in the future.

Happy Reading and Blogging !!!