Basic Principles of Organization and Management - Lecture 01 and 02 - Excellence

• What is management? 

  Management is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively.
  
  
  Efficiency means how well a person uses his/her resources at hand for the intended task.
  Effectiveness, on the other hand, refers to the capability of producing the desired output.

•  What is organization? 

  An organization is a social structure where a group of individuals work and manage different set of tasks to achieve a common collective goal. So effective and efficient management lead to better results for the organization.
   
  

  Excellence

  After discussing about what management and an organization refers to, let us understand what exactly Excellence is!!! I had a very enriching and interactive discussion regarding Excellence in the class this Thursday. And I went on to learn a few very important concepts about excellence.

        Excellence is something which a person in any sphere should strive for.

        To put it in kind of a mathematical form, Excellence is the product of Efficiency and Effectiveness.

Excellence = Efficiency  x Effectiveness

Any task done efficiently but not effectively will not classify as excellently handled. Same goes with any task done effectively but not efficiently. To pursue excellence in any task - a proper mix of efficiency and effectiveness has to be there. Efficiency and Effectiveness though 2 distinct entities don't happen in organizational life separately. As Management is about using your resources efficiently and effectively, both should be taken care for the management and indirectly organization to be successful.

But can the Excellence be achieved individually? Can the manager be the sole person responsible for the success of the organization? If the excellent goods and services achieved by an organization can't be replicated or be of any use for greater part of society, can we actually call it an excellence?

After some of the discussions, I came to understand the answers to these questions with the help of some thoughtful discussions and examples. A point which came through was Excellence can be achieved individually but at some point or the other a person will be needing assistance from his/her environment. A task done with the help of a group, if managed properly, will definitely produce a better output. Of course, if the group is not managed properly, it might produce results even worse than certain individuals working alone. Hence, it remains one of the primary concerns of a manager to manage the group/organization properly to achieve this excellence. We’ll be performing an experiment to analyze this even further.

Some of the illustrations which were quite probing were:

Illustration1:  Newton's Cradle - The different combinations of number of balls and how choosing them led to different kind of oscillations was quite an example of excellence.

Illustration 2: There was another illustration of a toy - a horse and a inclined wedge - made from simple material by a village boy, which led to motion of oscillating horse on the wedge as soon as you place it on it without the use of any energy also caught my attentive eye.

Illustration 3: A 'Valley Crossing' Example - Three people were holding a plank and crossing the valley. Obviously, it cannot be done individually but with three people they were able to cross the valley. It showed the importance of working as a team and managing the task in order to achieve our intended target/goal.

Apart from these illustrations, there was another activity which was carried out in the class. Before putting some light on that, I would like to explain some theory which I gathered from seeing that activity. It is regarding Goal Setting. There are 2 types of goals:

a) Ambitious Goals: Goal Set is higher than what you think is Attainable.

b) Realistic Goals  : Goal Set is less than or equal to what you think is Attainable.

For this, an activity named 'Tower Building' was organized in the class.

One of my batchmates was given some cubes of around (2cm x 2cm) and we along with him were asked to estimate on how much cubes we think he will be able to erect into a tower. My estimate was 16 and his was 10. He had to use his odd hand ( the one he generally don't use for writing). He was able to erect around 18 cubes before the tower fell consuming some 15 minutes or so. He was happy to achieve much more than his estimated target. But he was little confident that he will be able to do much more than 10. Still he set the target on a lower side so that the Goal Set is achieved. But the learning which happened was that when you know that you have higher potential set your goals to be high so that your attainable goal moves up. The short fall if any between goal set and goal achieved reflects gap in management and the need to cover it up.

One more situation was presented in front of us, to estimate the number of cubes that can be erected in case the person was blindfolded with 1-2 students guiding him. Almost 90% of the class lowered there estimate, Rest of them kept there estimate equal while only 1 person increased it. And that what is management all about to set ambitious goals.

On that note, I'll conclude this post. Happy learning !!!