Three Monks Film

In the last class of Principles of Management, we saw a short animated Chinese film on “Three Monks”. We all wondered that why Dr. Mandi had come up with this animated film. You might be wondering too that how an animated Chinese film can help in learning the Principles of Management. By the time you reach at the end of the blog, you will come to know. Let’s have a look on the film first.

The film goes on like this.

The first monk arrives to the temple on the hilltop and observes the vase to be empty with no water and the flowers wilted. So, he takes TWO buckets to the river to fetch some water. He fills the bucket and carries them on a stick back to the top. He fills the vase with some water and the flower again blooms. He stores rest of the water in another container. At night he does his normal daily prayers.

Now the second monk arrives and he needs water to drink and the first monk provides him from the stored water. But he was still thirsty. So he drinks some more water from the container. By the time he quenched his thirst the container gets empty. So he fetches another TWO buckets of water from river and fills the container. At night both of them perform their daily prayers.

The stored water again finishes. But this time the second monk asks the first one to come with him and they carry only ONE bucket to fetch water. While coming they have a little conflict as to where to place the filled bucket on the stick so that one doesn't have to work greater than the other. Initially they try to measure it by hand but cannot come on a conclusion as they thought the other person is trying to cheat. So they use a scale and mark a mid-point where they can hang the bucket and divide load equally between themselves.  

Now the third monk comes. Due to intense amount of heat is very thirsty. He drinks water on his way to the temple. But as he climbs the mountain top and reaches the temple, he becomes thirsty again. So he drinks all the water from the container. After this other two monks ask him to bring TWO buckets of water. He brings them, fills the container and starts to again drink the water from it and empties the container again and all of them start fighting to drink water from it.

Now no water is left in the container. The sun sets and it’s time for their prayers. Now the first monk tries to eat the fruits in hiding. He gets hiccups as the fruit gets stuck in his throat. But they don't have any water to drink so the first monk drinks the water from the idol vase he filled earlier. And each one of them tries to outdo one another in search of water from that vase.

Learning from the movie till now:

In the first 2 scenes, when the monks are bringing TWO buckets of water single headedly.

Input = 2 Units.

Output = 2 Units.

Therefore, productivity = 2/2 = 1 Unit.

In the 3rd scene, when two monks carry only ONE bucket of water between them.

Input = 1 Unit.

Output = 0.5 Unit.

Therefore, productivity = 1/0.5 = 2 Units.

	Scene 1	Scene 2
Input	2	1
Output	2	0.5
Productivity	1	2

So it can be seen from the table that productivity increases as they work in a team.

Now the film continues.

There comes a rat in the room where they are praying and the rat eats the candle in front of the idol from the bottom and the candle while falling down lights up the curtain. The curtain sets on fire and within seconds the whole temple is on fire. They get feared due to fire and start bringing water from river. During this they help each other to fetch buckets and buckets of water. The amount of productivity increases as they start to work in a team and they put off the fire.

During this, they come up with a better method to fetch water and that is using a pulley system - one person fill the bucket, another operates on the pulley and the third brings and takes empty and filled buckets of water leading to an enhanced productivity.

The three main characters learn to work together and in the end they all have enough water for each to drink.

Learning from movie so far:

Teamwork leads to increase in productivity. Also it leads to generation of new ideas which further may increase productivity considerably.

So at the end we can say that excellence can be achieved by doing the work effectively and efficiently. And this effectiveness and efficiency can be achieved by performing in teams.

Creative Problem Solving

Recently our faculty Dr. Prasad took us to the teacher’s terrace where a strange looking assembly was hanging. And we were supposed to identify the problem and solve it. This was a million dollar question for us. In any organization, a manager is very important in such situation, to identify the problem and solve it. This assembly is shown below:

Problem: Here we are supposed to remove the ring from the toy.

Now to solve this problem we need to follow the following steps:

• Raise the ring as high as it would go and hold it there.
• Move one of the wooden squares to the other side by passing it through the slit in the top part.
• Bring both the squares together by moving the thread.
• One of the balls will still remain stuck after its square block is taken to other side.
• Lower the ring, tilt it and remove through the slit and the ball.

As mentioned above this solution looks very easy. But some people thought to remove the ropes around the wooden block, then to remove the block and thereby to remove the ring.

Now to put the ring back into the assembly, we need to follow the following steps:

• Pass the ball through the ring.
• Tilt the ring and pass it through the slit.
• Pull the ring up above the slit.
• Remove the wooden plank, hanging on the same side of the other one but not having a ball along with it, through the slit.
• Let go of the ring.

This will put the ring back into the assembly as it was at the start of exercise. So we can see that the solution of the problem is always simple. We just have to identify the simpler way to solve it. It’s we who can make it simpler or complicated. So we can conclude that, being a superb solver is not sufficient. You have to be an incredible identifier as well.

Organizational Structure

An organizational structure consists of activities such as task allocation, coordination and supervision, which are directed towards the achievement of organizational aims. It can also be considered as the viewing glass or perspective through which individuals see their organization and its environment.  Organizations are a variant of clustered entities  An organization can be structured in many different ways, depending on their objectives. The structure of an organization will determine the modes in which it operates and performs. Organizational structure allows the expressed allocation of responsibilities for different functions and processes to different entities such as the branch, department, workgroup and individual. Organizational structure affects organizational action in two big ways. First, it provides the foundation on which standard operating procedures and routines rest. Second, it determines which individuals get to participate in which decision-making processes, and thus to what extent their views shape the organization’s actions.

Many companies spend huge amount of time and money in changing their organizational structure. Recently Infosys Ltd redesigned its organization structure realigning its services around four verticals - BFSI, ECS, Retail and Manufacturing. It shows that the company wants to present a uniform and consistent deal to its clients and avoid the problems of multiple deals across different offerings, because it had faced such situations in the past. This company was split across Geographies in the late 90's. By 2003, the geographies were merged and company was realigned based on respective delivery units. Gradually the whole company was re jigged across six different verticals. Come 2007 and five horizontal units were embedded within these verticals. Finally just a year back, it was realigned on the lines of four verticals with most of the horizontal business units being merged to respective verticals. It makes sense to the argument that companies spend huge amount of time and money after their organizational structure.  So the reason behind this is that it is important for the success of the firm. While the strategic decisions are taken by the top line management, it is the effectiveness of the organization structure which translates this strategy into successful implementation. 

Let’s have a look on four main blocks of organizational structure with respect to Infosys Ltd.

Division of work: Complex work can be better executed by dividing it among different people. For example, every project has some people working on different technologies. Some people working on high level design, others are doing project management etc.

Departmentalization: This involves grouping people into departments based on some logic. In Infosys Ltd they are categorized into departments like Delivery, Marketing, HR etc. Also verticals like BFSI, ECS etc. 

Hierarchy: Chooses who reports to whom. For example, Engineers reports to lead. Lead reports to PM. PM reports to GPM etc.

Coordination: This involves the integration of departmental activities as a whole and monitoring the effectiveness of this integration.

Few types of organizational structures are shown below:

And these types of structures were compared with the branches of trees brought by the students which I have shown below. So by comparing these structures with branches we got clear idea about the different types of structures.

Valley Crossing Exercise

Every manager knows the value and importance of Teamwork. In fact the very existence of a manager can be attributed to the phenomenon of 'Teams'. If human beings had long decided to do every task individually, the world would have been a totally different place. The Valley Crossing Exercise purely focussed on the phenomenon called 'Teamwork'.

First let’s have a look on the cartoon of this exercise:

Some of the basic ideas which need to be implemented while performing this exercise can be:

·         Speed of the 3 valley crossers should be synchronized.

·         Real Time Communication should be there among them - where they could communicate to each other how and what steps to be taken while crossing the valley. Also this would help them be on the same platform of thoughts which is of utmost importance in this task.

·         Gap Size between any pair should be uniform.

·         Closed Feedback Loop must be present.

This exercise can be divided in 8 steps which are explained below:

S – Safe i.e. if the person reaches on the land completely.

R – Risky i.e. person completely in the valley.

HS - Half safe i.e. one foot is in the valley and one foot is on the land.

Step Number	Person 1	Person 2	Person 3
1	S	S	S
2	HS	S	S
3	R	HS	S
4	HS	R	S
5	S	HS	HS
6	S	S	R
7	S	S	HS
8	S	S	S

Few Snapshots of the exercise when it was performed in the class:

                                               

                                     Step 1

                                                                                Step 2

                                                                                   Step 3

Things which I learned from this exercise:

·         Leadership – different from the tradition approach of an authoritarian team leader.

·         Proper Communication – Communication is the key to crossing valley effectively.

·         Trust Factor – Every person needed to trust each other completely especially when their feet was off the ground.

·         Conflicts Management – dealing with conflict openly and transparently and not allowing grudges to build up and destroy team morale

·         Goals – The goals were clear, defined and each member in the team fully understood the gravity of the problem.

·         Predefined 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. 

·         Coordinated Relationship – the bonds between the team members allow them to seamlessly coordinate their work to achieve both efficiency and effectiveness

·         Positive Attitude – an overall team culture that is open, transparent, positive, future-focused and able to deliver success.

Khan Academy

World is full of innovations. Khanacademy.com is one of the best example for it. It contains a free online collection of more than 3,200 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching 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 that's an extensive database of knowledge being delivered without having to spend any penny. What makes it more attractive is the fact that all these lessons have been recorded by an MIT & Harvard graduate in a closet at home with the help of a cheap headset. His name is Salman Khan (not the Dabangg one!) who was recently listed among the Time 100 Most Influential People for 2012. So innovation doesn't always require large amount of resources to create something. Sometimes it can just happen with the help of things that are easily available to us. And obviously along with the main ingredient is very important i.e. Passion. Yes, only the passion to do something for others combined with intellect can help create such an impact as Khanacademy did. The mission of this non-profit organization may not sound very unique but serves a very strong purpose.

"It is our mission to accelerate learning for students of all ages."

So how did this website plan to accelerate learning? The strategy was to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids’ own time and homework is done at school. Though it may sound very weird actually, it actually makes a whole lot of sense when we realize that students need someone around to help them with homework rather than when they are learning. This simple but innovative concept is now actually helping millions of kids around the world improve their grades and also enhance their learning potential.

Salman's words about the vision clearly points to the fact that this academy can actually be converted to school in future:

"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"

The whole concept of virtual teaching and practice seems to be based on a very old method of one-to-one tutoring. This method had been proved to very effective but was always considered expensive until now. The most impressive part is the way Khan teaches those lessons. He always assumes that he is teaching a seven-year old and therefore he never skips any step (which generally teachers do) while solving anything. He has an uncanny ability to inhabit the mind of someone who doesn’t already understand something.

Innovative Features:

Apart from the vast number of lessons, another eye-catching feature of the website is the interactive workpad feature combined with a dashboard application available:The application also has scratchpad which can be used to do rough calculations.

The dashboard application would track students’ individual statistics, showing them and their instructors how many videos they’d watched, how many questions they’d answered, and which ones they’d gotten wrong or right. Day to day, it’s hard to know what a student is and isn’t learning. A dashboard, Khan says, can change all that.

Khanacademy being a non-profit organization has significant backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google. Also, from time to time, it has received several donations.