My Digital CV

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouO9nP76pXA

Khan Academy for real learning of life

Living Life to Educate

Everybody is transformed into a mature human being by education . In today's world, Education has taken a new meaning of competition other than learning. All of us are running towards marks and recognition from other people , but nobody is concerned by personal development . This thought is very much prevailing in society and everyone is judged on this criteria. Still in every generation there are people who think differently and do things in a subtle which was done by a man called Mr. Salmaan Khan. Khan revolutionized the way we look at education. It all started when he started tutoring one of his cousins interactively using Yahoo Doodle images.

If talk about Mr. Salmaan Khan, he is a graduate of the prestigious MIT, born as a Bangladeshi and Haward Business School. Today his video tutorial library has more than 3500 video lessons encompassing lessons ranging from basic arithmetic to hard core complex functions and calculus, from biology to economics, from astrology to physics and what not.

The Khan Way

  How it all started:

The Khan Academy started with Khan remotely tutoring one of his cousins interactively using Yahoo Doodle images. Based on feedback from his cousin, additional cousins began to take advantage of the interactive, remote tutoring. In order to make better use of his and their time, Khan transitioned to making YouTube video tutorials.

                                    An Innovative Dimension to online teaching!

Our schooling system never treates a student to the amazing world of logic. Millions of children don't know that something like this exists. I was one of them until recently. But when I came in contact with it, it was amazing!! I was amazed to discover the extent to which logic decides every moment we spend the way we spend it. 

Now let's talk about the IITs. The institutions really grill the student. It's so tiring and stressful that students go into depression if they don't get a seat. But who's to blame? I say it's our schooling system. The IITs essentially test the student on the application of concepts. I never thought that I was applying when I was in my school. It's what Mr. Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, says - our teaching system at present follows "one size fits all" rule.

This system needs to change, and Khan Academy has done wonderful job in at least moving in that direction.

Mr.Salman Khan- Theory Y Manager

Mr Khan made  proves theory Y manager real . He saw an opportunity in the world of education and tried to change the status quo . He never thought that people will accept it or not but went to launch an concept which is thought provoking . Underlying concept was always to make an positive impact on student  and thought that students will take  it positively . Everyone is present to improve themselves and society as whole . This positive attitude gives strength to everybody  to change life into a better one .

All this creates an successful and happy manager who is vibrating and willing to change . He tried that everybody gets appreciation on their performance so he created following concepts  

1.     Hall of fame wall.

2.     Appreciation wall.

3.     Student of the month.

This is further aid to the motivation of students.

Conceptulisation:

Conceptualization concept states that how we can integrate small parts and creates something much bigger. Here is the biggest example that I have come across in recent time, which elaborate this concept further.

Khan has stated a vision of turning the academy into a charter school:

This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever.

A November 2011 grant of $5 million from Ireland-based The O'Sullivan Foundation, founded by Avego MD and cloud computing pioneer Sean O'Sullivan, will be directed to three initiatives:

1.    Expanding the teaching faculty

2.    Extending content through crowd-sourced contributions following a Wikipedia-style model

3.    Developing curricula to help users blend the content with physical teaching through STEM learning

A series of summer school camps are planned to start in Northern California from June 2012 to test curricula for real-world schools.

Last Thoughts:

The conclusion part would be this that in case you wishes to actually do something that as a visionary educator like Mr. Salmaan Khan, then make sure that you follow the few principles mentioned below:

1.     BOUNDED RATIONALITY: As a manger one must always make sure that no crude data in full form will ever be available, you must have a visionary leader and a forecaster to make sure that with limited information one must be able to make sound decisions.

2.     Management by objectives: In organization every bit of planning is done by keeping by keeping objectives in mind. Vision must be Impossible, Crisp, Rosy, kick for anyone who reads it.

3.     Believe in Hawthorne Effect: A term referring to the tendency of some people to work harder and perform better when they are participants in an experiment. Individuals may change their behaviour due to the attention they are receiving from researchers rather than because of any manipulation of independent variables.

The Valley of Trust...

While the current thinking in business schools hold that all someone with an idea needs to succeed are focus,clarity and a good business plan,I have found that bringing together a great team that’s united by a strong motivation,determination and bravery is much more important.

                                                                                                           -Richard Branson.

 The Valley Crossing exercise purely focused on learning this phenomenon called 'Teamwork'.

Explanation of valley crossing through this picture: Let’s have a look at the below picture

We can see that there are three people crossing the valley without much of a trouble. It has been possible only due to teamwork had made this impossible task possible. This is the beauty of team work, the MAGIC works in this way.

We have the following observations:-

1.       All three members have equal distribution of different kinds of situation :

          High Risk 01 times

         Half Risks 02 times

         Fully Safe 02 times

2.       All three members have the same role in terms of effort and risk. Nobody was overloaded or           relaxed.

Learning 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,  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 an 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 unrecognized 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.
• Effective participation in meetings and team events etc.
  
  
  
  
  

  
  Signing out on a note: Inventories can be managed but people must be lead.
                                                                                           - H.Ross Perot.

  
  

AlumGyan.....

It was my first official interaction with the Alums Mr.Nikhil and Mr. Hemant , it was an enlightening and intellectually stimulating affair.

Mr. Nikhil a senior manager in KPMG Consulting gave insights into how an industry operates and about maintaining work-life balance which is very essential for business administration student to know.

Both the alums shared their views on various aspects of entrepreneurship and challenges associated with it.According to them one should not become an entrepreneur for wrong reasons, just because one has a bad boss,tight work schedule or one hates his job.One should become go on to become an  entrepreneur if he has the stomach to battle against all odds.

They also shared experience of their entrepreneurial venture the 'Masthisk'. How they made it a grand success.Mr Hemant a HR consultant in KPMG shared his experience of 'Mandi' event and working in Mandi had helped him understanding intricacies of Marketing.

Take away for me from the interaction was Ideas are not stupid but their implementations might be stupid.You could have a brilliant idea but you could mess it up by poor implementation and similarly even stupid ideas could be a success through proper implementation. 

Waiting for next Alum meet.

Signing on a note: “Every time you state what you want or believe, you’re the first to hear it. It’s a message to both you and others about what you think is possible. Don’t put a ceiling on yourself.”

                                                                                                               - Oprah Winfrey

3 Chinese Monks : A Lesson for Life.........

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".

Few things about the film:

The story of the three Monks is an anime film directed by A Da. The film has got many recognition including:

i)        outstanding film award at China's Ministry of Culture.

ii)       Best animated film prize at the first Golden Rooster Awards in 1981.

iii)     four international awards including a Silver Bear for Short Film 

         at the 32nd Berlin FilmFestival in 1982.

Storyline:

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.

Lets discuss and analyze the various situations that arises in the film and also relate to real life situation.

When only one monk is there:

We find that in this case there is only one monk and he carries two bucket of water. It may be sufficient for the monastery as consumer is also one. Here innovative ideas are not being implemented as there is one person so demand being very less and it is getting fulfilled by the resources bought by the same person. In organization this self sufficiency attitude is required for example there is only one member in a team and he is responsible for all the deliverables, then he had to take care of all the requirements and necessary activities to be done without depending on other person.

When Second monk joins the first monk:

Two monks share the load of a single bucket of water. Still they find it difficult because there is no coordination between them. Both of them wants to be in the easy state and wants that other person to do all the work. This situation is very common in any organization. Every team member hardly put equal efforts, here dependency arises and sometimes team work is hampered.

When the third monk joins both the monks:

The work comes to a still as third monk enters the monastery the other two force him to go and fetch water. This particular case is a perfect example of social loafing in an organization where people start exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when they work alone. Moreover the lack of proper coordination between the members in the team results in complete organizational failure.

Learning from the Movie:

Productivity

In general Productivity is a ratio of production output to what is required to produce it (inputs). The measure of productivity is defined as a total output per one unit of a total input. In the video, productivity is different for 1 monk bringing water alone, 2 monks bring water and 3 monks working together. It is seen, productivity increases as the synergy between the works increases. Following table shows the relation between productivity and synergy in different cases.

Method	Effort	Productivity	Synergy
1 monk	10 J by 1 person	2 buckets	NIL
2 monks	5 J each	1 bucket	Minimum
3 monks	Minimum	Highest	Maximum Synergy and Inter-dependency

Thus creating a humane environment for all employees so that maximum synergy and inter-dependency exist in the system. This will result in the highest productivity for the organization.

Crunch situation

But we see that in the face of crunch situation, all the three members forget their internal differences and work in a synchronized manner to improve the situation. This results in work being properly distributed in which results in highest efficiency when compared to all other previous cases.

This particular instance highlights that the manager must have a strategy for crisis management. Such a crunch is a common in an  engineer to order manufacturing setup as I have been there, during the time of deadline the pressure increases in numerously and at that time everyone realizes and meet the deadlines with team effort. The role of manager is very critical in the crunch situation as at that time employees do their job properly but there must be someone who can steer the ship and give proper direction.

Adversity is mother of all Inventions:

We saw that after the crunch situation is over, the monks went for innovative ideas due to which work-load is reduced with the help implementation of those innovative methods and proper coordination. Thus the management of any company should focus on technological advancement and innovative ideas so as to increase efficiency

Singing out on a note: 

“Individual Commitments to a group effort- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”

                                                               -  Vincent “Vince” Lombardi

A Towering Goal.........

"There's nothing wrong with having your goals really high and trying to achieve them.That's the fun part you may come up short.I'ave come up short on a lot on my goals,but it's always a fun to try and achieve them"
                                                                                                            - Tiger Woods
What are goals ???
There are certain things in life that you want to accomplish or milestones that you may wish to achieve.Those are your dreams and the moment to put deadline on them and commit yourself towards them, those become your goals.

It is always better to set challenging goals even if that means occasionally falling short,rather than set simple goals which could lead to dissatisfaction and leave you wondering if they were to easy.Often people are inclined to set rather simple goals for themselves & in process they forget that kind of goals one sets tells the world what kid of person you are.This is best highlighted in Harry Potter & Chamber of Secrets when Dumbledore tells the young Harry "It is our choices,Harry,that show what we are truly,for more than our abilities".This applies to young students,production managers,sales executives etc.

As  Dr. Mandi rightly said when you set a goal it should be challenging. To achieve that goal you need to stretch every bit of  your abilities and once to achieve it next time you need to set even more challenging goal & work towards achieving it.We need to set and achieve goals in a upward spiral.

One  thing I firmly believe is  that one's goals must be out of reach but not out of sight.Goals must be realistic.A good example to support above statement would be the tower building (using small building blocks) exercise conducted in class.The previous record was 27 blocks tower and the team aimed for 30 block tower which was out of reach (taking a clue from previous attempts &given set of constraints ) but definitely not out of sight.

The team succeeded in breaking the previous record which was combination of higher expectations of them from others & themselves.Such a condition where greater the expectation placed upon the people,better they perform is called Pygmalion effect or Rosenthal effect.

The Pygmalion effect is an important instrument in management theory. It makes managers be aware, that the success of their employees depends not only on qualification, personal qualities or working environment. Manager always has to believe in his people and expect them to achieve the best results. In such case the subordinates will always feel this trust and demonstrate their best skills and abilities in their work.

Signing out on a note: What you achieve is a function of what you think you are.

Simple recipe of Management -3 Es & The Curious Case of Craftsman in new Business world

3 Es of management are Efficiency, Effectiveness and Excellence

Effectiveness can be explained in terms of what is achieved. It is about whether targets are met or not. Performing effectively means that the right work is being completed. Managers are responsible for making sure that this happens. If a team is working really hard but not delivering what is needed, then they are not effective. Effectiveness is measured by setting out clear objectives before work starts and then evaluating whether the objectives have been met or not.

Efficiency can be measured in terms of the inputs required to generate the outputs. It is about the way in which work is completed. It is part of a manager’s job to help improve efficiency. For example, if the same work can be completed using less inputs or resources then efficiency has improved.

Excellence is product of efficiency and effectiveness where efficiency serves as speed and effectiveness serves as direction.

Excellence= Effectiveness x Efficiency.

Every manager can be a better manager and understanding the 3Es Effectiveness, Efficiency and Execellence can help improve business performance.

Craftsmen like cobblers, carpenters etc. work alone to accomplice their task. Organisations mass produce working on a large scale than craftsman. Craftsman thrives & succeeds on his skills and simplicity. Contrary to that we have massive organisations thriving on efficiently executing complex processes. Organisations take the person based approach of craftsman to next level by adopting process based approach. Craftsmen seldom involve management in their work whereas organisations are built on rock bed of management, managing people and resources. A good craftsman knows his trade in and out for e.g. a cobbler knows the entire process of shoe making from design conception to giving finish touch to it on other hand in an organisation different people take care of different processes.

 Craftsmen are highly skilled on the other hand organisation deskills labour. A very good example given by Dr. Prasad about KPO and BPO business based on this deskilling and disintegration of work so that less skilled people can be absorbed & more control can be gained by organisation.

Craftsmanship	Modern Wage
Highly Satisfied and has personal pride associated with product or service	Alienation is very high
Work done is in sequential manner	Work done is in parallel manner
Highly skilled	Deskilled
Absence of Interdependency	High Interdepency

The methods of lean production aim to combine the flexibility and quality of craftsmanship with the low costs of mass production. In lean-production systems a manufacturer's employees are organised in teams. Within each team a worker is expected to be able to do all the tasks required of the team. These tasks are less narrowly specialised than those demanded of the worker in a mass-production system, and this variety enables the worker to escape from the soul-destroying repetition of the pure assembly line.

I shall be blessed to have your feedback.