Team Building
Dr. Prasad’s attempt to teach management lessons using games
is unique in itself. This time it was cubes. He asked us to make a tower using
small cubes. To make it more interesting he asked us to bid for the opportunity.
The deal was finalized at Rs 500. The winner was asked to make the tower using
single cube as base. He did it and made the tower of 16 cubes. Professor then
asked what u learnt from this exercise. Someone said, to maximise the output
one has to make sure that the centre of gravity of each cube should lie in a
single line and hence company’s strategy should inline with optimum use of resource and the output.
Contradicting to everyone’s belief, he said you didn’t learn anything from this
exercise because this exercise is equivalent to ‘Craftsmanship’.
Craftsmanship-According to dictionary, a craftsman is “a person
who
practices a craft with great skill”. He might be expert in his own skill
but his earning, scaling and scope of expansion is limited. The analogy goes
like this, a cobbler might be expert in stitching the shoes but from beginning of
his career to its end his scope of growth is limited. In order to scale up his
business to the height of BATA, he has to bring several such cobblers together
then by managing the operations, sales, human resource of the organization optimally,
he can multiply and can scale his business to newer heights.
Now to give the new dimension, Dr.Prasad asked us to
volunteer for tower building exercise. This time 8 people came. The person who
was building the tower had to be
blindfolded, there was one person who was guiding him and others 6 had to make
strategy to build the tower. This time the group was able to make the tower of
7 blocks only.
Using this, he explained the current situation existing in
the organizations. The shop floor worker is similar to blindfolded person. The
person guiding him is similar to supervisor and the other six are like middle
managers. The managers are directing the worker but chaos is so high that worker
is unable to understand anything, this in turn affecting the growth of the
organization. In an organization there should be top managers, workers and only
small number of middle managers, only those who could justify their work and
positions.
This ends the interesting lecture of Prof. Prasad.
