NAVARANG PUZZLE: Never Play a Solo Game

When Dr Mandi is Expected into the class, we can always expect something new, that shall be in stake for us.

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It was Dr Mandi once again. This time a new type of thing.

The Navarang Puzzle describes its speciality with 27 blocks identical cubes,6 faces, 9 colours each, and no colour being repeated !!!

The Navarang Puzzle describes its speciality as a cube having 9 different colors on each of the face.. NAVRANG CUBE is a simple playing cube composed of 27 identical cubes of 9 different colors (3 cubes of same color). The cube has hole in 5 sides and a connector in one side so as to hold on the other cube. When seen, it resembles like the Rubic cube but is very different in nature and composition.

                            

Now the whole cube was disintegrated to smaller blocks and we were asked to reassemble it!!
Looked easy but really Tough task!!
The purpose was : We needed to ensure no clash of colours, maitained at each step

Finally Mandi Sir Showed up the right way of doing it.
He took 3 cubes of same colours and arranged then in the form of stairs.
 i.e.
123                                      456                             789
  123                                       456                             789
     123                                       456                             789

He then took the rods of 123, 456, 789 together and stacked to eack other in different orientations.
Now that, one plate was complete, he did the same for next plate, And finally our cube was complete.

So the approach was,

Disintegrate:

1 block ----> 27 pieces

Integrate:
27 Blocks elements ---> 9 Rods ---> 3 Plates ---> 1 Block

The main idea behind it was:

When a manager is given a situation:
1)  He should see the problem as a whole.
2) Then divide the problem into smaller parts
3) The divide the problem to still smaller sub-parts

To reach to a solution:
1) He need look into the solution to each part if the problem
2) Then integrate the solutions and problems together
3) And come up with a solution on a broader Perspective, looking into every aspect of the problem

Every organisation has a mixed set of people and a different set of skill. We need to take the advantage of their of the differences and build up on it\.\

Three Idiots Crossing the Valley

The Activity
The task is to cross a deep valley. Well it may seem like a difficult and dangerous task to begin with. We have three main protagonists who have a bamboo strong enough to take the weight of each of them at a time. The three Protagonists devise a plan. They stand in a straight line, resting the bamboo on their shoulders. Step by step they negotiate the hurdles coming their way. helping each other out in the times of need and finally conquering the valley. The pictorial representation of the entire task can be shown a
follows:

                                                       

Firstly, there was a constraint before performing the task i.e no more than 3 people should do this . Secondly , there was no description about gap length, distance between 2 people, length of pole ,height of all 3 people,etc. As being an engineer, all these figures and calculations were running in my mind.

Then including me sir called 3 people to take a pole and perform this activity on a plain ground just for understanding.

To perform this activity , task has to be divided in 9 process or stages where 3 people would be in between these 3 stages -  safe , half risky and full risky. So stages were like :-

Step	State of 1st Person	State of 2nd person	State of 3rd person
1.	Safe	Safe	Safe
2.	Half-Risky	Safe	Safe
3.	Full-Risky	Safe	Safe
4.	Half-Risky	Half-Risky	Safe
5.	Safe	Full-Risky	Safe
6.	Safe	Half-Risky	Half-Risky
7.	Safe	Safe	Full-Risky
8.	Safe	Safe	Half-Risky
9.	Safe	Safe	Safe

The total number of steps taken: 27
Where three were full risk Steps, 6 half risk steps and rest 18 were safe.
Our aim to this activity is to reduce the risks and half risks to safe zone.
When the risk zones cannot be reduced, proper precautions need to be taken to curb this.
Every step requires dedication and synchronization of thoughts and action to safe the valley safely.
In management too, every step needs to be measured before taken to reduce significant errors, that can put the whole company as a whole at risk.

Mohammad Yunus: A Messiah on the Holy Earth

This time we were assigned to watch a video  Muhammad Yunus.
The video Lecture by was a guest.About what made Muhammad Yunus to come up with the idea of a Grameen bank and how did he Pursue his dreams.
The video was an eyeopener for us, and with a session of Dr Mandi, The impressions of the idea has got deeply engraved into our minds.



Muhammad Yunus is that rare thing; a bona fide visionary. His dream is the total eradication of poverty from the world. In 1983, against the advice of banking and government officials, Yunus established Grameen, a bank devoted to providing the poorest of Bangladesh with minuscule loans. Grameen Bank, based on the belief that credit is a basic human right, not the privilege of a fortunate few, now provides over 2.5 billion dollars of micro-loans to more than two million families in rural Bangladesh. Ninety-six percent of Yunus's clients are women, and repayment rates are near 100 percent. Around the world, micro-lending programs inspired by Grameen are blossoming, with more than three hundred programs established in the United States alone. Banker to the Poor is Muhammad Yunus's memoir of how he decided to change his life in order to help the world's poor. In it he traces the intellectual and spiritual journey that led him to fundamentally rethink the economic relationship between rich and poor, and the challenges he and his colleagues faced in founding Grameen. He also provides wise, hopeful guidance for anyone who would like to join him in ''putting homelessness and destitution in a museum so that one day our children will visit it and ask how we could have allowed such a terrible thing to go on for so long.'' The definitive history of micro-credit direct from the man that conceived of it, Banker to the Poor is necessary and inspirational reading for anyone interested in economics, public policy, philanthropy, social history, and business. Muhammad Yunus was born in Bangladesh and earned his Ph.D. in economics in the United States at Vanderbilt University, where he was deeply influenced by the civil rights movement. He still lives in Bangladesh, and travels widely around the world on behalf of Grameen Bank and the concept of micro-credit.

                                                   

In 1972, Yunus returned to Bangladesh after eight years as a student and professor in the US and became a professor of economics. He had no intentions of becoming a banker. Bangladesh had been devastated by its War of Liberation and a famine followed shortly thereafter. In his autobiography and again in an interview with me, Yunus has told me how the faces of silent starving people haunted him, and his economic theories seemed like fairytales, totally useless (Yunus, 1999; Interview, 2010). He wanted desperately to be helpful. In the nearby village of Jobra, he set up a cooperative with farmers and landowners to grow rice more efficiently. The yield at the end of the season was high but he discovered the farmers had robbed him of his share of the profits.

Seeking another way to help the poor, Yunus took groups of his students and colleagues for numerous field trips to Jobra to learn about poverty. One day he lent some small amounts of money, less than twenty-seven dollars in all, to forty-two impoverished villagers. To his surprise, they paid him back. He discovered over the next months and years that not only do the poor pay back their loans even without any collateral, but also they pay back at rates far higher than the 60% rate that was typical of commercial banks. This was the defining moment for Yunus (Yunus, 1999). He had found a practical way to help.

The early years of his organization were rocky. In spite of Yunus' impressive results, none of the bankers in the region would help Yunus expand his experimental project. They just didn't believe Yunus' reports or his numbers. Eventually, in 1983, after years of negotiating with skeptical bankers and haggling reluctant government officials, the Bangladesh government recognized his organization, now called the Grameen (village) Bank as an independent bank.

Yunus turned conventional banking practices completely upside down. Not only did he lend to the poor with no collateral, which was unheard of, but also, when he discovered that women used loans to improve the situation of their family more often than men did, he focused on lending to women. When he started out, only 2% of bank borrowers in Bangladesh were women. In the 1980s, women in Bangladeshi villages spent their lives in the confines of their family compounds and many had never even touched money.
As the years passed, Yunus succeeded in attracting women so that today 98% of the Bank's borrowers are women. Locating his
branches in remote villages, he brought the bank to the people rather making them travel to the larger towns and cities.

Other banks lent to individuals but instead Yunus required borrowers at Grameen to form peer support groups and to use their loan for a small business. At first Yunus thought all the borrowers in a group should be in the same kind of business. From trial and error, Yunus learned that groups of five worked better than ten and that having a mix of different kinds of businesses in each group was more productive than single business groups.

Lessons from Muhammad Yunus about Leading Long-term Change

1. Set forth an inspiring vision and stick with it.
2. Innovate. Challenge the prevailing wisdom.
3. Build a team that owns the dream.
4. Communicate. Relentlessly communicate within and beyond the organization.
5. Be Flexible. Change strategies, goals, and tactics as needed.
6. Be patient and persevere. Sometimes you have to wait.
7. Embed your values into the organizational culture.
8. Brand yourself and your organization.

Magnet!! A Chime and Rythm for Management

                            Magnetic Forces..

A manager should be like a magnet

So whats new this Time? And it was a magnet !!
Dr Mandi Comes and Distributes some Magnets with us.
No what can the implication of a Magnet be ????

What we know about a Magnet is A magnet attracts and aligns the iron particles along the lines of Forces.
 So a magnet is symbolical of a Rhyme, a rhythm and a force that brings all forces together.

In a organisation A manager is the Magnet. He is the aligning force that decides the alignment of the organisation. In many organizations, it's hard to remember a time when non-managerial employees were kept in the dark about strategy.

We're often reminded about the corporate mission statement, we have strategy meetings where the "big picture" is revealed to us, and we're even invited to participate in some business decisions. We're also kept aware of how our day-to-day activities contribute to corporate goals.

This type of managing hasn't been around forever. It's an approach called Management by Objectives (MBO), a system that seeks to align employees' objectives with the organization's goals

Using Management by Objectives with your team offers several benefits.

First, MBO ensures that team members are clear about their work and how it benefits the whole organization. It's easy to see why this type of managing makes sense: when the individual parts of an organization work well together, the whole operates smoothly and efficiently. By focusing on what you're trying to achieve, you can quickly distinguish between tasks that you must complete, and those that may not be worth your time.

MBO Tool !! Here is How it Works !!

                                     

Implemented on a team level, MBO can be seen in many of the key techniques needed for effective team management, including team briefing, goal setting, performance appraisal, delegation, and feedback.

On an individual level, we all want to see our work as purposeful and meaningful, and MBO makes a clear link between individual effort and the organization's mission – this is great for our sense of purpose!

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The Three Monks: Team is Perfection

Three Monks is a Chinese animated feature film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. After the cultural revolution and the fall of the political Gang of Four in 1976, the film was one of the first animations created as part of the rebirth period. 

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.

Lessons of Management:

In the first scene :

The 1st monk is very kindhearted and cheerful. He finds happiness in keeping every one happy. To fill the bucket, he enthusiastically goes down the hill to fetch water and comes back, but his energy drains out after few attempts.

Delegation : From manager's perspective, no matter how skilled a person is, it impossible to handle all situations single handed. If an employee invests too much of energy in one single work, he may not be able to strike a balance in the other important aspects). His productivity is on a decline with passage of time.Hence it is important to divide the work skill full and efficiently.

In the next scene:

A second monk enters the monastery, he volunteers to bring the bucket of water. Later both the monks feel the need to divide the work between them.  There arises a conflict between the monks as each one of them try to escape the work burden. The carry pole is too long for a bucket of water. As a result the two monks keep shifting the bucket weight from one side to other depending upon their convenience. Sanity prevails when the first monk brings out a scale which divides the work pole into two equal parts. This shares the work burden equally among the three monks.

                       

Productivity: Here we see that the productivity of each monk has increased as the two monks have started working in unison. Let me explain this with the simple table.

Productivity = output / effort

Effort for carrying 1 bucket full of water = 1

                                  

	CASE  I	CASE II
Output	2	1
Effort / person	2	0.5

Thus it can be seen that Productivity in 1st case  = 1

Productivity in 2nd case  = 2

As the work gets divided the productivity of the work increases. In an organisation the work has to be effectively divided among the employee in order to work efficiently. This lessens the burden of each employee and extracts the maximum output from each of them.

Optimization of Work – Just as the first monk uses the scale to equally divide the work load, it is important to use some innovative tool or a standardized and unbiased procedure to share work among the employee. This can act as an effective tool for conflicting resolution and help the employee to work harmoniously.

In the third scene:

Now the third monk enters the story. Being stout and plump, it takes much of an effort to climb the hill and reach the top of monastery. He drinks all the water from the pot.  The other two monks tell him to replenish the pot of water it is seen that the pot of water is too less to quench the thirst os all the three monks. This triggers a conflict between the three monks. Finally no one bothers to bring water to the monastery.

                               

Beauraucracy - Which is synonymous to the " Two cats and the Monkey story".In case of lack of rules there is anarchy and lawlessness. For an organisation to function there has to be a proper framing of rules. This gives a definite direction to the course of work.

      

The fourth scene:

At night, a mouse comes to scrounge and knocks off the candleholder leading to a devastating fire in the monastery. As the three monks smell trouble.  They start running with the bucket of water to the bottom of the hill and do everything to put off the fire. They work in unison in this moment of trouble and finally succeed in extinguishing the fire. The three monks then shake hands to acknowledge the effort put in by all three of them. They begin to live harmonious life. The temple never lacks water again.

TEAM IS PERFECTION:

At times of desperation, the three monks acted like a team. Unfavorable situations are the true test of one’s character. It is only during such situation that we realize what we are capable of doing.

The Tower of Building Hopes !!!

                             A New Day! A New Beginning With Dr. Mandi..

In this class, our task was to make a Linear tower, with the help of single cubes in two situations. 

In the first situation, we were asked to guess the height of the tower in terms of Cubes. The highest guess being 14. The highest guesser was asked to build the tower with the blocks and he could stack 22!

                                          

The Significance was . In the business world.. One shouldn't under commit and Over deliver, nor over commit and under deliver. Both the cases affect the credibility of a company adversely. Therefore one should commit proportionately to the supply. 

In the second situation, there were three people who were to build the tower. But the constraint was to build the block blindfolded and by listening to the guidelines given by second person. A third person was to be summoned when at the time of crisis. The aim was to beat the score of the first case i.e. 22.

Thus,

                                                   

Aim set : 23

Accomplished : 25

                                                          

Inference Made:

In the first case, the person was deciding and Doing. Where as in the second case the person was asked to do in the given guidelines. If we try to differentiate our both the situations, relating to the parameters like Work, Skill, Satisfaction and Time, We find that:

For the first case:( When one person is involved):

The Work is ambiguous.The skill ans satisfaction levels remains constant and so as the time.

Whereas,

 In the second case( Involving more than one person):

The Work is crystal clear but Deskilling takes place. The satisfaction level also decreases with the number of workers involved.

The over all time of operation decreases.

In the real time environment, to accomplish a project,

WORK----> JOBS ----> ACTIVITIES ----> TASKS ---->ELEMENTS

i.e. We need to enlarge the work to many entities to get to the DNA and Combine them back to get to the solutiion.

The Management Concepts: 

SMART GOALS:The Acronym for SMART doesn't end here, SMART represents a plethora of Words:Defining goals and attaching them to an action plan in a strategic way enables you to gauge progress and determine precisely where you want and need to go. Achieving a goal is beyond satisfying and naturally leads to a healthy vicious cycle. One of the most effective methods of goal-setting is called SMART goals. SMART is an acronym for:

                                                                                Apart from the general meaning. SMART indicates a plethora of Words like:

                                   

                             

SMART is a mnemonic, giving criteria to guide in the setting of objectives, for example in project management, employee performance management and personal development. 

THE PYGMALION EFFECT: 

The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, is the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they perform. The effect is named after Pygmalion, a play by George Bernard Shaw.

The corollary of the Pygmalion effect is the golem effect, in which low expectations lead to a decrease in performance 

                                           

Pygmalion Effect Stresses on Inspiring People and Working towards Perfection.

GOAL SETTING:

The  Goals should be set realistic. The Goal setting & Goal Achieving should impact each other and Should evolve with time like The Fibonacci Series and should be potential based

                                                 

These concepts are used at every step to plan anything. These concepts are used in every organisation to set goals and achieve goals in a synchronized manner.

Thus the Concepts float with the flow of the Session with Dr Mandi. And Yet another class comes to an end.

The Class:

CLASS OF PROFFESOR "MANDI"'

"WHERE PROFESSION MEETS iNNOVATION "

Second Day in the class: 
" Two Hours Lecture !!! Seemingly, A never ending Day :( "
With this attitude, I enter the class..

 After a brief wait, I find a lean man entering into the class.

Suddenly...

The whole class is into murmurs... And Yes.. He was Professor "Mandi"..

The very Instruction to the Class was to Come down and sit on the Floor.

It seemed strange but when a Professor says... Simply.. One doesn't have an Option.

And in Blinks, each of us were on Floors...

And ... Guess What???

Even Professor Mandi !!!!

And the Class starts..

First of all.. He Opens a bag and distributes some toys.. Something that seemed like a soft ball with imprints of a globe, Plastic butterfly and a Newton’s cradle.

1^st Sitting on the floor… Now toys??? Hmm. Interesting….

But Why toys???

In some time, he made us realize that there are a lot many other angles to look into a situation; more than the ways we perceive. We need to more open in our thoughts to look through them

The toys were examples…

The sponge ball could also be perceived as a toy, that would help a small boy learn faster than going through cumbersome Atlas Books !!  

                                                 

The Plastic Butterfly was a balancing toy, which could have hung in air for hours with a point contact.. Amazing!!!

                                           

                                                                      

Third and the best was the Newton’s Cradle .. That made us keep guessing till till the last.. “What if these number of pendulums hit the remaining????”

                                              

Apart from these;

His Sole focus was on IDEAS… The IDEAs that can earn..

Like me. I guess most of the people would have left the earning part to the end of the two years. But his words, made us rethink on our plans. When I am spending so much for being at NITIE.. Yaar!!! Rs 25 a day toh banta hai !!!

Then we had a light Q&A session. He laid a lot of emphasis on asking questions with his words “ Pucho-Pucho”. The Q&A session seemed like a Professor Mandi’s initiative to help us open us, participate and share our thoughts…

The class was delightful summation of knowledge, idea, fun. Interractions and nevertheless Smiling Faces J J J