Building Organizations

Professor Prasad is full of surprises, and having his class at the very beginning is always a delightful start to a day and today was one such day. Professor Mandi,as he is popularly know, has a different approach to unraveling the complexities of management, which i call "Uncomplexifying" Management. "What is management ?", would have a million definitions but "what can be a management?"  would provide a better insight. This is "Uncomplexifying" by Professor Mandi.

In which type of organisation would one prefer to work ?, is it the one with a "Hopeful" manager who does not believe  in stressing on criticality or is it the one with a "Hopeless" manager who does not shun away in passing on the pressure to the subordinates?.

Now does the buck stop with the manager?.What if the employees too can be categorized into  "good" employees and "bad" employees?, would it aggravate the current scenario to worse or would it prove to be an effective combination?

This puts forward an interesting game of combinations. Now apply the same probability to an organisation having 1,00,000 employees.

"Do you think you know management?"

The answer is right above in bold italics. If a huge organisation is sustainable with such varied combinations it would solely be because of effective "management". Management thus optimizes resources to bring an organisation closer to its goal. It would provide stability through practices that would provide uniformity in  the course of action and draw a forecast for the future.This makes management and organisation intangible at every level of functioning.

It also becomes binding for us to understand the word Organisation before we learn management. Professor Mandi conducted a simple experiment in the classroom  to explain "organisation".

This simple experiment was done to explain Organisation and its composition. A craftsman working individually would not be called an organisation, thereby management principles would not be significant in his case. The lack of incentives would not motivate him to build on management principles and hence he cannot be a part of an organisational structure.But does building a tower require an organisation or management theory?

"yes"

We can still apply the same principles to the task. This can be done by scaling the task by incorporating in a large number of people.Imagine a group of 2000 people working to build similar towers, this is called an organisation. All the 2000 people now have a common objective , to build towers. This also puts forward a new challenge, the identification of jobs. Management therefore not only focuses on combining and optimizing the resources available, but it also identifies key functionalities in the process of structuring an organisation.

The practicality of the above scenario was exercised by another experiment. A group of ten people volunteered to build on a common tower. But, there was a twist to the tale as always,the tower was to be built blind folded!!!. The one building was guided by a team of ten people to build the tower, and the result, he could stack only 7 cubes.This now changed the focus to the details of an organisation.

Middle tier employees and their inefficiencies were observed through the experiment. Therefore building an organisation with huge number of employees would not suffice, but ensuring proper set of responsibilities at all levels and at every instance is a trademark of  a successful organisation.Putting in Professor Mandi's tone "If removing you doesn't remove my profits, i will remove you"

The clock then struck 11 AM to end another of Professor Mandi's intriguing sessions. We have not only understood management and organisations as definitions , but also have been able to interlink both the entities to understand their significance in building a successful organisation.

I call this

"Uncomplexifying" Principles of Organisation and Management