Team Building

Dr. Prasad’s attempt to teach management lessons using games is unique in itself. This time it was cubes. He asked us to make a tower using small cubes. To make it more interesting he asked us to bid for the opportunity. The deal was finalized at Rs 500. The winner was asked to make the tower using single cube as base. He did it and made the tower of 16 cubes. Professor then asked what u learnt from this exercise. Someone said, to maximise the output one has to make sure that the centre of gravity of each cube should lie in a single line and hence company’s strategy should inline with  optimum use of resource and the output. Contradicting to everyone’s belief, he said you didn’t learn anything from this exercise because this exercise is equivalent to ‘Craftsmanship’.   

Craftsmanship-According to dictionary, a craftsman is “a person who practices a craft with great skill”. He might be expert in his own skill but his earning, scaling and scope of expansion is limited. The analogy goes like this, a cobbler might be expert in stitching the shoes but from beginning of his career to its end his scope of growth is limited. In order to scale up his business to the height of BATA, he has to bring several such cobblers together then by managing the operations, sales, human resource of the organization optimally, he can multiply and can scale his business to newer heights.

Now to give the new dimension, Dr.Prasad asked us to volunteer for tower building exercise. This time 8 people came. The person who was building the tower  had to be blindfolded, there was one person who was guiding him and others 6 had to make strategy to build the tower. This time the group was able to make the tower of 7 blocks only.

                         

Using this, he explained the current situation existing in the organizations. The shop floor worker is similar to blindfolded person. The person guiding him is similar to supervisor and the other six are like middle managers. The managers are directing the worker but chaos is so high that worker is unable to understand anything, this in turn affecting the growth of the organization. In an organization there should be top managers, workers and only small number of middle managers, only those who could justify their work and positions.