POM Video

Three Monks

Three Monks is a Chinese animated film directed by A Da and produced my Shanghai Animation Film Studio. The 18 minute short film is without any dialogues is released in 1980. Since then it has been critically acclaimed and recieved many awards. Lets take a look at the video now.

The film is based on the ancient Chinese proverb "One monk will shoulder two buckets of water, two monks will share the load, but add a third and no one will want to fetch water."

It can be understood that all the three monks are good at heart from their introductions. But still they were not able to achieve a harmony initially,  Why?? This is where the role of management comes in. 

All human beings most basic tendency is to get everything done without any effort, i.e. be lazy. If you can manage to get your work done by someone else you will be most happy. Mostly, prey to this will be the junior most member in the group. This is what has happened with the monks too. I am sure that  it might have happened to most of us.

This is where the role of a manager comes in. He has to increase the total efficiency of the system. 

Efficiency= Total Output/Total Input

Initially the only person was there and he used to fetch the water himself. When the second person came, they shared the load. With the addition of the third, no one is ready to fetch the water. Thus efficiency of the system has come down to zero or the system ceased to operate.  It is the responsibility of the manager  to divide the work efficiently and effectively among the team and to ensure that it is done. 

Here in the case of fire, the three monks joined to put out the fire. They did the work effectively but not efficiently. They doused the fire.  With only one man, there is only one way to carry the water. With the second they measured the stick carrying bucket and hanged the bucket exactly at the centre of the stick. Now the weight of the buck is shared equally by them. With third one, they put a rope and pulley system to bring the water up. Thus managers have to be innovative also.They need to make drastic changes depending on the changes in the system. 

They continuously improved the system with the addition of the resources and finally reached a set up where maximum efficiency is achieved. Thus continuous improvement is also a key to success.

Last but not the least is the team  work. As the number of men increase, output decreased i.e. number of buckets of water brought decreased. This happened because of lack of co-operation. When they started to work together as a team, their output increased. 

Thus small clip has shown us the importance of the role of a manager, continuous improvement in the system and team work.

Valley Crossing Experiment

Valley crossing experiment was one of the best examples of learning management lessons through simple but thought provoking way. How many lessons can you learn from like the one given below??

zi

If you look more closely you can learn a lot of things from this experiment. The most important lesson from this is the importance of team work. Just working in the same office under the same head did not mean team work. Every member of the team should share risk, responsibilities and should be a part of decision making. Then only it can be called team work.

In this experiment, it starts with analysing the number of members in the team and choosing the team. If the width of valley is more than two foot steps, the team should have more than three members. If the width is less than 1 foot step, each one can cross the valley independently without the help of the other. Thus the number of members of the team was to be identified. The person at the centre is always carrying more weight since he is acting as the fulcrum when the other two are crossing. That is the roles and responsibilities should be assigned based on the capabilities of the persons.

This is classic example of flat organizational structure in which no one is the boss of the other and thre responsibility of all are same. The guy at the front, at the middle and at the back have same role in the decision making. They all have to do self analysis among and who should agree on the who should play which role based upon their strengths and weaknesses.

An important aspect of this learning is the risk sharing and trust. All of them had one point or other had to completely depend on other members. This something which happens in everyone's case. We as human beings has to trust others. As you all know it is very difficult to build trust, but can a be destroyed in a moment. In this particular at first guy at the friend is completely depending on the other two to safely cross the valley. The and last person shares the weight of the second person to cross the valley and similarly the last one. Trust and risk are opposite ends. If there is complete trust on other team members, you need not worry about the risk. If the trust is less, risk is more.

Another important aspect of team work which we are learning is communication and coordination. The action of the three in the above coordinated. Otherwise there are chances that only of them of not acting according to the plan and risking others too.Therefore before doing any combined activity, the exact action plan with even the minute details has to made and the roles and responsibilities of each should be clearly defined. These should be clearly communicated to each member of the team. Any flaw in communication can lead to failure.It also be clear and precise. Otherwise it will be like the cartoon below.

I would also like to share you a video which communicates a message which is relevant in these days of rising CO2 emissions and high fuel prices. It also depicts the importance of team work.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a non profit educational organization created in 2006 by Salman Khan, a triple graduate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science), he pursued an MBA from Harvard Business School. The plight which Salman Khan choose was rather unusual and a daring one.

Salman Khan

 After graduating from Harvard Businees School, he began his career as a hedge fund analyst at Boston. He was requested to help his cousin Nadia on mathematics who was staying in New Orleans. He began to give her lessons remotely using Yahoo's Doodle Notepad. But later because of the difficulty in finding a free time for both of them, he uploaded YouTube videos of lectures.What happened was his cousin actually preferred YouTube Videos over live sessions. He also noticed a large number of people are viewing his videos in YouTube. Hits increased tremendously and he started to get encouraging mails and comments.

He thought of what can be reason for so large popularity for his videos. In the case of YouTube videos, viewer can actually pause the video, repeat the video and even view it at later time to refresh. The speciality of the videos was that, it avoided the standard format of person solving on a blackboard. Instead videos were like a person solving a problem on a piece of paper thinking loudly. As days passed, the popularity of his videos increased. He began to put Youtube lectures on a large number of topics mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics and microeconomics, and computer science. Now there are more than 3200 videos available on his YouTube channel on various Topics.

He tried to analyze the reason for the popularity of the videos. Different students have different pace of learning. Some may be quick to understand a concept while they may take a longer time to understand a similar concept. This varies from student to student also. Therefore one of the major draw back of class room education is that all the students are taught at the same pace. Some may understand what is taught while some others may not. There is also a limitation on the time a teacher can spent on teaching one particular kid. So those kids, who didn't understand the concept are left behind. This fundamental issue can be solved using video lectures. Students can pause the lecture to understand a topic, repeat the same again and again, can do the studies at a time he finds suitable at any place which he finds comfortable.  There no one is actually left behind. If some one needs more time on a particular topic, he can spent as much as time he require. The student is also saved from the embarrassment of asking publicly his doubt. 

It is this understanding which made Salman Khan to set up Khan Academy. He quit his job as a hedge fund analyst in 2009 and devoted all this time for Khan Academy. The mission of Khan Academy is

"Providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere"

  

 After the introduction revolutionary YouTube lectures, he thought of taking Khan Academy to the next level. Khan Academy is current offering different interactive sessions for students through the website www.khanacademy.org. The were given self assessment tests where the difficulty of the test varies according to the proficiency of students in the subject. The main philosophy behind course formulation is increase the interaction between students and teachers & between students. To achieve this, Khan Academy actually wants students to do the learning at their home at their convenience and the problems or exercises will be done in class rooms where teachers will be actually able to spent quality time with students. It also encourages those doing well to help struggling class mates. This Khan Academy method of teaching is implemented in a few schools and is proved to be extremely good; improving overall performance of the class and there is no below average students after implementation of this program. This can be considered as an extra ordinary achievement. There are provisions in the website to track how much time does a student has spent in understanding a particular concept, how many problems has he completed etc and all this data can be accessed by the students teacher. This also lets a teacher to know the problematic area for a particular kid, there by giving more personnel attention. 

Khan academy works with a vision is to create "the world's first free, world-class virtual school where anyone can learn anything."

After quitting his job he found it difficult to fund for the entire program. Due to the popularity of his videos, he got some donations in the range of $1000 to $10000 from various places. Khan Academy website also earned $2000 dollars per month from advertisements in its website till 2010, when it stopped taking advertisements. Khan academy has significant backing from Bill Gates Foundation. It also has received a $2million from Google to create videos on more topics and to translate the core library into worlds most widely spoken languages.

Working with such a small capital and its a non profit institution, Mr. Khan thought it would be difficult to attract good talents for addition of lectures on topics and development & maintenance of website. To his astonishment there were a few talented people, who are ready to join his institution. They are ready to work for an average upper middle class salary. What they seek from this is the satisfaction they are deriving from working for a social cause like this. He found all the people in his team are self motivated and they need little further motivation (Theory Y). Working with a small team on a very small capital, Khan is set to change the world educational scenario. 

Dr. Mandi, Session1

Principles of Organization Management. It was the first class of this subject and all the students were waiting for the professor to arrive. Some time later he came and introduced himself. " Hi all. My name is Dr. Prasad. I would like all of you to call me Dr. Mandi".   Because of my "profound" knowledge in Hindi, I immediately asked the guy sitting next to me and found that it means the small temporary shops set up to sell fruits vegetables etc. But that led to the next doubt,"why should some one call himself 'Mandi' ?"

The later I found out that the name was just a tip of the iceberg. After all our introductions, Dr. Mandi started the lesson by the following quotes

"Socho   Becho.… !  Becho Seekho.. ! !   Seekho Socho.. !!!"

"Aaj ka roti ..Aaj hee kamaenghe !
  Behatar padhai kae liye.. Kamai ! !"

He started by talking about the problems of the current education system. He told that current educational system is grossly inefficient in performance, unaffordable  and inaccessible to the many needy people. He elaborated it. The knowledge gained from class rooms are never properly understood and  never utilized properly. Neither the teacher nor the students make honest effort to understand the topic and learn about its real life applications. This makes our education system inefficient. Due this inefficiency lakhs of crores of public money is getting wasted. What all government spends on education is going fruitless since what the students has learned is never is put to use anywhere. This makes our education system unaffordable and inaccessible.

According to Dr. Mandi, students should earn enough to cover up educational expenses from what they have studied. Then only they will understand the value of education and will contribute to the growth of themselves and nation. Astonishingly not even a single student was there in my class who earns themselves for their educational expense. Even me too is in that majority. 

Later he showed a simple cuboid with each of its side made two sticks of different length joined together, such that all the faces of the cubes has two squares and two rectangles.  He asked us to explain what each face of the cube represents. A class containing 70 engineers, who all have scored good percentiles in cat was not able to recognize that it represents (a+b)^2. And the volume of the cube is (a+b)^3. That was a self realization. Even after all this years of studying am I not able understand how to represent (a+b)^2 pictorially. this was the case with most of us. This showed us how inefficiently is our system of education.

He told the story of a few engineering students who earned money to pay for their fees by selling an item. What they sold was a set of pendulums which could demonstrate the principle of transfer of momentum very easily. The theory is pretty simple, which everybody knows, construction is very simple and still no has ever thought of making it. They sold a 10,000 pieces of that.

Only by now I could understand what he has told in the beginning of the  class.

"Socho   Becho.… !  Becho Seekho.. ! !   Seekho Socho.. !!!"

"Aaj ka roti ..Aaj hee kamaenghe !
  Behatar padhai kae liye.. Kamai ! !"

He described the "Mandi" fest, that is held every year in our college. This is where Dr. Mandi is puts into practice the principles told above. I think the video below would give you a small idea of what Mandi is.

 This is where students of NITIE i.e. us are putting to use the lessons in MBA class in real life environment. The students will sell items which are based simple logic, basically of the type which helps the younger ones to learn better on the streets of Bombay. They will learn about basics of marketing strategies, segmentation etc directly from the fields, at the same time generating a considerable amount of money, much more than that was spend for the event.

By the time class ended all of us were eagerly waiting for next "Mandi".

Session 2: Goal Setting

The second lesson was on goal setting. A perfect example of goal setting process is the annual performance management system for appraisal of employees.  At the start of each year, employees is expected to pen down the major performance areas (MPA) against each of which there is an expected midyear and final percentage that is to be achieved. These MPA’s are the goals that employee needs to accomplish. The characteristics of such goals can be summarized in the following acronym.

S.M.A.R.T

We learned the exact meanings of each of them through the “Tower Challenge”.

First, the entire class was asked to take part. After a round of bidding, three of us got the chance to play this game. There were several small blocks. And all that was needed was to stack up these blocks to create the largest tower.  But it is not as easy as you think; it has to be played with certain conditions. The person building the tower should be blindfolded and also he should use his left hand. We were asked to quote the number blocks in the tower.

A few of us quoted less than 15, while the majority quoted it to be between 15 and 20. Finally we agreed upon 18.

Now the task is set and it is time bounded since it has to be completed before the end of the session.

Our objective was well defined specific and measurable i.e. try to create a tower of blocks that would contain 18 blocks.  

Next, as the goals are set, the three lucky ones were given different responsibilities to carry out the task at hand. One was to build the tower blindfolded and with his left hand. One of should instruct the blindfolded about the moves as well as motivate him using his interpersonal skills. The third one has to make sure that the entire process was carried out skillfully and effectively. This actually represented the three sets of people in a company.

1.  The Working Executive

2.  The Middle Manager

3.  The Top Management.

The following are a few pics at different stages of work.

 1. Beginning stages

  2. Completed tower

3. Our Team with Dr. Mandi

And our team finally made a tower 18 blocks, thus breaking all the previous records and successfully achieving the mission initially set. But it was not a cake walk as you may think.  The session was really useful in understanding through practical sense the goalsetting process and the effect of all parameters on the vision and mission statement.

While carrying out this task we also learnt about the two theories of management, namely Theory X and Theory Y. Here, in this task the manager overseeing the entire task could have handled the situation in two ways:

     1. In Theory X, management believes that the working executive is not performing well  enough up to their expectations. Therefore the management tries to motivate the working executive to perform more.

     2. Whereas in Theory Y, management believes that working executive is performing well and no further motivation is necessary for completing the mission.

In the above scenario, the Top management  believed that the person building the tower is performing well and therefore is Theory Y form of management.