Be my critic! Will help the writer inside me to develop. As I always thank Flipkart for making me read books again, I will have to thank Professor Mandi for this blog.
Through out our childhood we have come across fables and tales which have narrated the lesson of unity, teamwork, togetherness, etc. Be it the all time famous "Three Little Pigs" or "Bundle of Sticks", all of these short stories have imbibed in us the spirit of working together. Here is another effort made in the same directions.
Chinese animated feature film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in the 80s highlights few such teachings again in altogether a different way.
Directed by - A. Da
Written by - Pao Lei
Cinematography - You Yong
Release Year - 1980
Few of the awards which this anime received are
Outstanding film award at the China's Ministry of Culture
A young monk (red) 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 (grey), but the carry pole is only long enough for one bucket. The arrival of a third monk (yellow) 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 candle holder, leading to a devastating fire in the temple.
Key Learning
This animation is unique in that unlike most animations, it does an excellent job of getting its point across without any spoken words, the audience who does not speak any Chinese can easily understand it just as good as Chinese.
The film depicts how the three monks behave differently in different situations. The same is true for humans also. We tend to relax when we see other doing the work for us. This is exactly not how a great organization is created. A successful organization is created by individuals who can be held accountable for their work without monitoring them. They don't need a watchdog to tell them when they have to work. They are so self motivated that producing results becomes a habit for them.
We usually have a notion that if the work force increased the productivity will automatically improve, which is absolutely wrong. What is required is proper harmony & coordination among the team members. The very same group of individuals can be held responsible for not delivering the results and also they can deliver something out of box, for that they need to work in tandem, listen to each others idea and then act accordingly.
Here is the 20 minutes animation film
Teamwork is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.
Back in the summers of 2004, a 12 year old kid had come to spend her vacations at her cousin's place. This kid used to bicker and backer about basic elementary math and had vowed not to take math at the high school. A worried mother spoke her heart out to the cousin and asked if he could do anything? This cousin of the young kid started teaching her over the phone and things went alright. As few days have passed, there started creeping in fatigue and other factors which made this learning over the phone unproductive.
One fine evening when the cousin was having dinner with his old friend from college, he suggested him to make videos and post them overYouTube. Gradually the hits on the videos increased and noticed hits from unknown people, who by distance were not related to this gentleman. He was perplexed as to how come this is possible?
No points for guessing who the cousin was! Yes, we are talking about the dynamic Salman Khan. A pioneer, who is an MBA and double Masters in Science from the coveted Harvard Business School (HBS) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), respectively. He had a vision in mind, "changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere". Below is the MIT 2012 commencement in which clearly states the vision of his organisation.
MIT 2012 Commencement, Courtesy : YouTube
What is Khan Academy all about?
Khan Academy (KA) is an innovative resource which challenges the conventional way of education system by providing world class education, anywhere and everywhere free of cost. KA boasts a collection of around 4,500 videos spread over the domains of elementary math to college level science with a hint of humanities and soft skills courses too. Below are few numbers which are mind boggling. Have a look!
Around 5 million unique students have watched videos over KA last month.
Every month there are around 80 million lectures delivered.
Till date, there have been around 260 million exercises completed
On a different note, Sal (as he is more often known as to the Silicon Valley) says that KA has taught more students than what HBS has taught till date from the time of its inception. Which is like WOW!!
What triggered Sal to upload his tutorial videos?
It was around 2006, when Sal started approaching his close friends and relatives and started offering tuition for their kids. There were times when Sal found the entire teaching process as mundane and wished why was he required every single time to teach the same stuff to different kids. These students had many doubts but they couldn't ask him as the kids had a preconceived notion that the teacher would be judgmental about their understanding. Say for example, "Oh! you can't even understand this??"
He then decided to put up the videos on YouTube. One of his students left him a note that, "It's better to have you in video, rather than having you in person". This made him believe that students require a different way of learning things, unlike the elementary way of learning.
Difference between the thought processes of the two systems
What do we learn as Managers till now?
There are two very important things which we can learn till now.
Never blame the top most person of any organization, rather dig deep and analyse the root cause of the problem How do I support this statement in the above context? Say, we need to build a house of three floors. We are there with the plot and lay down the foundation. Now, contractor says that the work done is around 70-80% and it will do, lay start the work with the next floor. The same thing we apple for the next floor also and ultimately when we are erecting the last one, the entire house falls down. Now, whom would you blame? Contractor on the top most floor or the foundation one?
The same goes with education, when the fixed features are the ones which are with the traditional system highlighted in the image above, problems like these are bound to happen. You got to have the fixed feature as, "How well do you learn the stuff?". Only then you can have satisfactory results.
Optimization of the most scarce resource
How effective a manager is? This is a trait which every organization looks for in a manager. In this context, the most scare resource is the time for the human being, that is the student here. Now, if we can maximize this, then we can do wonders. So, KA has developed resources through which it has optimized the "student to valuable time ratio".
Human potential is immense, you just need the right tools to harness it
According to a survey conducted, in a class it was observed that there was a student who was doing very bad at math. Now, the traditional way of education had forced him to consider himself good for nothing. But then the very same student when was given the liberty to study the subject at his own pace, only motive being that how much he learns. The results were surprising. The very same student after a period of 6-7 months had topped among the same set of students. What can we infer by this survey? Every individual (student here) has the same potential, you just need the right person who can act as mentor to him/her and harness the same.
If we stretch this example to the previously learnt Theory X & Y type Managers and the available workers to him. We can say that no matter what set of workers a manager gets, its always the Manager who can drive the results. He has to approach the situation with a Theory Y type of mindset.
What do we learn as Budding Entrepreneurs?
Salman Khan was working with a successful hedge fund company. He started imparting telephonic tutorials and slowly he started with video tutorials for his cousins. One day he finds a need to upload these videos over the Internet. He starts getting multiple hits on his videos which excites a social servant within himself. He then decides that, whether I remain on not, my videos should and they should do some benefit to the society. So, he quits his jobs and starts a Non Profit Organization which will educate the students for free, everywhere and anywhere. Somewhere down the line, he had a belief that he would be able to lure financial supporters. With this intent he quits his job full time and sticks to his organization.
Weeks passed by and still there were no financial support for this brilliant idea. Though he knew what he was doing, but then too for a minute he thought of updating his resume and hunt for job. he used to get donations of few dollars now and then bu then that wasn't enough to carry on this NPO.
One fine day, he finds a donation into his Pay Pal account of $ 10,000, which is a huge amount of money. He contacted the lady who donated the amount and she finally set him up a meeting with "The Bill Gates". Slowly, things were starting to look brighter. Big players like Google, Melinda & Bill Gates Foundation roped in and rest you know is history.
Key Learnings
One should always have a bigger picture in mind when you come up with a venture. There should be long term thinking. Here, he wanted to impart free and world class education to students all around the globe, irrespective of the profits to be earned.
One has to back his/her instincts and shouldn't just give up.
Opening lecture of a new course at my new college. I have studies a similar course in my engineering days, Principles of Management. There were in-numerous thoughts going through my mind about how the course would be, how will the methodology would be? Will it be again running down of slides and mugging up the fundas of management? What will it be? And the class begins....
What makes you say wow? Only thing which came to my mind was Apple Inc. I was like, iPhone & iPad are the coolest products which I have experienced in the past 24 years of my life. Why has an organization become so important for individuals? It is all because of excellence. Excellence is the thing which sets apart Apple Inc. from its competitors. Now, we all know that how Steve Jobs was the founding pillar of Apple, how he revived the fortune of the near to bankrupt company. But then Apple Inc. is still innovating and mesmerizing its customers with fantastic new products. Why is all this possible? This is all because of a basic rule of thumb. You never set an individual above an organization, it is the organization which sets itself apart from the rest. Excellence is all about how efficient and effective you are at the same time.
Another interesting part of the lecture was the notion of setting goals. Prior to this, I used to believe that the concept of goal setting is
Notions before understanding what exactly GOAL SETTING is.
A : Goal Set
B : Potential
C : Performance (actual)
D : Performance (achievable)
Now, the explanation to the above preconceived notions were like, I used to believe that whatever goal we set should be higher that the potential, hence, goal set > potential. Also, I believed that our actual performance will always be higher than the achievable performance.
But then after understanding the actual sense of goal setting, I realized that every individual has an immense potential, so we just can't keep the potential at a lower level.
Perception after the class.
So, "A" has to be potential for each and every one. The goals which we set are always lesser than our potential, but there should always be efforts done in order to bridge the gap between our potential and goals to be set, "B" is our goal set. Finally, we can say that "D" will be our achievable goals and "C" will be our actual performance. With every iteration, our target should be to raise the bar of goals to be set.
An organization often depends upon how good its Managers are. Attitude of a manager is usually directly related to the work culture which prevails at the work place. Manager with a positive outlook can drive his/her subordinates to strive hard to deliver the desired results and there may also be a case when another manager with the same set of subordinates may deliver abysmal results.
Broadly speaking, we can divide the managerial style in to two categories, X & Y. Theory X is the one where the team members are not motivated about their work, nobody wants to take responsibility and the results are unsatisfactory. Contrary to this Theory Y team members are the self motivated ones who deliver results. Their results are a clear reflection how much they love their work and are rewarded duly for the same. The first thought which comes to our mind regarding these two styles is that, Theory X must be consisting of workers who are not capable of producing the results, or may be not up to the requirement, say the bad employees, whereas on the other hand, we must be thinking that Theory Y is blessed by highly skilled work force, say the good employees. This is where the contradiction lies. These two categories are wholly dependent on the type of managers leading the teams. This is not about the workers involved. Manager being the captain of the ship can dictate the terms. He can either make the environment at the workplace as authoritarian or make it as participative.
Authoritarian Type
Participative Type
As we are talking about the managers, let us assume that there are two types of workers present with any manager. Say lazy workers and not lazy workers. Managers can also assume their workers to be lazy and not lazy.With a simple permutation, we can see that there are four possible cases arising in front of us. I will quoting examples from the place I used to work, subsequently after every case.
Case A: Given the Workers are lazy and their Manager assumes them to be lazy, then the Manager falls under Theory X.Having worked in a PSU, there were a set of employees who were just promoted on the basis of the years of their service instead of any academic qualification. The usual nature which used to be there with these set of workers was to "let go" things. They hardly used to bother much about the effect of their attitude on the work. Manager knew this very well and he has excepted this, hardly bothering them to work hard and produce result, instead loading the few people who used to work hard. Due to this, the set of workers who were working better than the former ones started feeling that they were being exploited and with due course of time, even they became unproductive. So this type of managerial style falls under Theory X.
Case B: Given the Workers are lazy and their Manager assumes them to be not lazy, then the Manager falls under Theory Y. In the very same organization being talked about, there was a team headed by a different Manager also consisted of team members who were the same as above quoted example. Instead of accepting them as unproductive, he has decided to assign work according to the competencies of the individual. As it is a well known fact that every human on this planet possess immense potential, so it just depends on your guide/mentor, how they can extract the same out of you. With such type of Manger's attitude, the results were quite visible. So, even having a lazy set of workers, the Manager did not assume that his workers are lazy and hence, this type of managerial style falls under Theory Y.
Case C: Given the Workers are not lazy and their Manager assumes them to be lazy, then the Manager falls under Theory X. This particular case is very harmful for any organization. Having a motivated, talented pool of individuals and then assuming that hey are good for nothing just rips off the team dynamics. This case is a very common incident in the current scenario. I have seen many of my friends and colleagues who are a premium example of this case. I will take an example from my work place itself. A very young, dynamic boy from one of the premier engineering institute joins this PSU. Now this boy was very keen on doing things differently, due to which his name was in good books in a short span of time. Manager under whom this boy was working had different thoughts. He thought that due to the pro activeness of this young chap, his position as a flag bearer is threatened so he started side lining him from the coveted jobs. All this made the working conditions for the new boy difficult and hence made the boy to look out for other options. So, we can say that just because of the wrong doing of the manager, the company had to lose an able employee and it is also sure that many others around him would have sensed what happened. These type of managers can be easily classified as Theory X.
Case D: Given the Workers are not lazy and their Manager assumes them to be not lazy, then the Manager falls under Theory Y. This is a win-win situation for any organization. The overall work atmosphere is so positive under such kind of managers that the desired results float out automatically. Again coming back to my previous experiences, I would like to quote an example from my six month long summer internship at Mercedes Benz Research & Development India, Bangalore. I was working there as a Research Trainee. My project manager was such a dynamic personality that working under him was a pleasure to any employee. The pool of individuals working under him were all devoted to the cause and so was he to the subordinates and the company. Experiences like this do leave a pleasant patch in your memory which you do cherish year after year. I would say that his manager would be an ideal manager for any organization and he would fall under Theory Y.
With the above cited examples, I would like to convey my message that Theory Y type Managers are always desirable and these are the ones who thrive an organization towards excellence and innovation unlike Theory X type Managers. Now, being in a premier management institute, what I can learn from this is immeasurable. Prior to this lecture, I used to always think that both the workers and managers at fault. But after this session, I being a future manager, have to imbibe these teachings upon me and make a promise to myself that I turn out to be a Theory Y manager. Whatever be the available resources with an individual, he has an immense caliber to turn things to his favor.
