Valley Crossing Problem.

Another fun activity in the class along with the important learning was arranged for us by Dr. Mandi. The name of activity was Valley Crossing Problem.  

What is Valley Crossing Problem ?

The problem is that 3 people have to cross a valley and the only resource they have is a rod. The width of the valley is such that it is longer than a step a person can take but shorter than 2 steps a person can take.
 

Solution :-

1. When the first person will take the first step, he will be half risky since one of his feet will be in air and other on the ground, at the same time other two people will be full safe.
 
2. Everybody will take one more step at this moment, first person will be fully risky and other two will be full safe. But since other two people will be holding the rod, with proper communication and trust the first person will not fall and so they can cross the valley.
 
3. This process will be repeated for other two persons. Every time they will be either half risky or full risky.
This is depicted in the diagram which will give the clear picture of the Valley Crossing problem.

 

Persons	First Person	Second Person	Third person
Step
1	Safe	Safe	Safe
2	Half Risky
3	Full Risky
4	Half Risky	Half Risky
5		Full Risky
6		Half Risky	Half Risky
7			Full Risky
8			Half Risky
9	Safe	Safe	Safe

  Learning from this activity :-

1. Team Work :- Team  Work ofcourse play a important role here . It is very much understood that the valley could not be crossed by the single person but  if we do any task (even to the highest extent of difficulty) in a team then we can definitely  can find a effective approach towards the problem and solve it easily . In this same way , organization performance cannot be generated individually , every person working in the organization should give their best shot in the work to achieve excellence. One of the very good example of team work which we see today is INDIAN Cricket Team. All the players in team India try to give (and they actually give) their best performance in cricket and hence result is in front of us. Team India is currently number one cricket team of One Day International Cricket. So, Team Work is very much important for the excellence.              


2. Communication :- Communication is perhaps the most important aspect to achieve anything. In this example , all three have to communicate continuously to achieve this task. Similarly, In an organization it is very important that every level of management, should co-ordinate each other and with the work force. Communication is best medium  to make others understand about his/her own plan, feeling , thought. A clear communication can help to bind the team together and achieve the task goal in efficient manner.

3. Trust :- If we working in the team , then trust also plays a very important role. Trust for three people crossing the valley is very important , as at different times, a particular person becomes  vulnerable and his safety lies in the hands of the other two people .Similarly, in the case for any small or large, significant  activity in any organization. As the success in any endevour of the of the organization hugely depends on teamwork, trust among the members is important for coordinating effectively to achieve the objectives of the organization. For example in Indian Cricket Team the captain shows his full trust on his team members and in turn team members also show their full support to the Captain. If this sort of structure prevails in the team or organization then no body can stop it from achieving the want they want.

4. Goal :- Goal setting determines the ultimate objective. As all the three people who were crossing the valley, has one and only one goal i.e. To Cross the Valley. If they would not have the common goal then , they could have never ever have succeeded in crossing the valley. 

5. Harmony :- Every member in the team and especially the leader should try to maintain the calm and harmony in the team or organization. Harmony in a way keep the environment and the work culture pleasant and this directly and indirectly boosts the efficiency of the team or organization. Here  also the three people work in harmony and no one seems to be irritated or annoyed. Had this been not the case , they would have failed. Like the captain of Indian Cricket Team , he seems to be very calm ,self motivated and this adds sparks to his fellow team members  which automatically brings positive energy  to the team.

A Session with our Alumni

Today was one more exciting day at NITIE. This day was exciting because for the first time we the IM20 batch of Section A were going to meet the three Alumni of NITIE . These Alumni belong to IM10 batch, quite a long difference. So, I was ready to take as much as can from them, their experiences, their learnings and anything which I could possibly get.  We went to the class then after few minutes Prof. Mandi entered in  with one of the alumni , his name was Nikhil Kulkarni. Actually first of all I want to express my gratitude to the effort of our Prof. Mandi  sir who had arranged our session with the alumni . Thanks a lot sir.!!!!! 

 

Prof. Mandi introduced us to the Nikhil Kulkarni and then he passed the proceeding of session to him. Nikhil  Kulkarni is very decent person, I observed him as simple living and high thinking person. Before starting the session he liked to took our views,  that what we are expecting from this session, and what questions does he really need to answer during the session.  In response to this there were several question out of which few of them were - What are the learning from NITIE, which we have to implement in our jobs. What is the scope of starting a our own business venture. How is life post NITIE. These were some of the questions. It was then our  session officially started. The very first topic he talked about is entrepreneurship or starting of one own business venture. There was a clarity of thought in the manner, he was speaking out.

Our class including me were seems to lost in his discussion and certainly there was our listening skills at its best. So, on the entrepreneurship part , he tried to analyzed our thought that why some of us want to take it up as a career. Basically in my opinion , he was trying to make out that it is really our passion to start a business or its all about  glamour. He then talked about the difficulties arising out of starting a business. The capital we require for starting a business could possibly be too high, might be 50 crore would be very little figure for statring a company. It is not easy to raise a capital of such amount and more over it requires more dedication ,personal time. According to him getting a good profile in good company and starting a business is more a like same thing. He told us that there is good amount of earning involved in job which is at par, there is big responsiblity involved as in entrepreneurship as same here in job also , there is lot of big tasks available which gives us the same feel like we are managing the business of our own. In Entrepreneurship we have to make people work in such a way that they are able to generate the revenue three times of their salary. The employee who is working for the company not only generates the revenue but also generates the salary of the manager/people who are above him in the company hierarchy till CEO's. Nikhil Kulkarni's target as set by his company is to genrates the revenues ten times more than his salary and we can imagine what kind of hard work and managing activities it would involve while doing a job. So, in no way we can say that entrepreneurship is better than doing merely a job.

At the end of  the day it is the satisfaction level that we people tends to derive. If we derives the maximum satisfaction level from entrepreneurship , then we must go for it and on the other hand if we are more satisfied in doing our job for company then , it is not bad either. After giving us the realization of the similarity and differences between  the two he proceeded with the his own experience in NITIE. He told us that there will be plenty of time, we would be getting in NITIE to work upon idea of starting a business , then if we find feasible , we can absolutely go for it.

One of his most interesting experiences , which he shared with us was  evolving of Mashtisk, a sort of online prerna ( Prerna is famous committee of NITIE related with organizing fest and all.) At this point of time his friend and our another alumni Hemant joined. Hemant happens to be co-founder of Mashtisk. Both of them talked about what difficulties they faced and how the concept of mashtisk was evolved. During their class meet , when Nikhil introduced his idea regading Mashtisk  but several others batch mate rejected on several presumption but then later it was Hemant who supported Nikhil. The idea of mashtisk was to designed a site were several kinds of business related games would be played. These games would actually test the management learning and skills of individual along with the business strategy. Any player has to submit his/her own business strategy of the games before 3 AM of the day and then from 3 AM to 6 AM , administrator has to download all the strategy of person , upload new with cases for the of new day. So this was kind of hectic schedule they had. After few days this concept gained momentum and now there were more people who voluntarily  wanted to be part of this team and thus it evolved on bigger domain. Mashtisk has a team of thirty members which comprises of both seniors and juniors.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win is very well suited here."  Their idea of Mashtisk was successful because it had a proper and definite vision, mission, commitment.  The rest of their year in college the team managed it very well. Then the discussion shifted to the work culture and how do we maintain it. It was also quite interesting . I gained the insightful knowledge of work culture post MBA  studies.
So, here I am concluding the blog. I tried to post a full experiences of the Alumni which I could gather. It was very much interesting, full of knowledge and for that all credit goes to our great Prof. Mandi. Thank Sir , you for helping us to interact with our alumni . I have tried to extract a full,  out of their experiences and this certainly help me in the future.

Three Monks.

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. It is also referred to as The Three Buddhist Priests. 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." The film does not contain any dialogues, allowing it to be watched by any culture, and a different music instrument was used to signify each monk.

SUMMARY
A young monk arrives in the temple and starts living a simple life in temple situated on top of a hill. He sees that there is no source of water inside the temple and there is so much scarcity of water there. Down the hill there is a river flowing. The water could be brought from there only. As the hill has the steep slope so, it
was some what difficult to bring the water up on the hill to the temple. But since it was the utmost need of the monk , he has to bring the water with the help of carry pole and tiding two bucket at the ends of pole. He has one daily task of hauling two buckets of water up the hill. After few days there came the another monk. This gave the first monk a reason to relax. Now first monk always instruct to the second monk to bring the water for temple alone, but this could not continued for so long. Second monk wanted the first one also to join him in work. They tried to share the job with each monk, they hold the carry pole from the end while one bucket was hanging there in the middle. In the middle of way they faced too many problem and after few time they came out with a solution which in turn enable them to accomplished their task of bringing the water up to the hill. 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. This continued for some days. One night, a rat comes to scrounge and then knocks the candle holder, leading to a devastating fire in the temple. The three monks finally in emergency 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.

Working Method involved in the Story.

Working Method 1: One monk fetches the water
The monk fetches the water faithfully and regularly every day. As his needs are limited and he was alone he doesn’t mind carrying two buckets with a stick on his shoulders.

Working Method 2: Two monks fetches the water
When the second monk moves in then they both try to bring water in single bucket together. Initially they both fight over how to carry water because the bucket would  tend to slip either side since they had difference in their height. But later on they find a solution with the help of standard ruler and cutting the pole so that it  do not slip. With the help of short pole ,they jointly fetch a single bucket of water every day. Although they work as a team but it seems as if they are not satisfied with each other.

Deadlock Situation
When the third monk moves in, both monks try to delegate entire work to the newcomer. In fact third monk fetches the water once but he consumes all by himself. After arguing with each other constantly over whose turn it is to fetch the water, nobody goes to fetch the water. No water gets fetched even after they all are , thirsty. Sometimes deadlock situations also arrives while there is transition from one step to another.

Working Method 3: Three monks work as a team to fetch out water

When the fires broke out in the temple. All three monks then put aside their personal ego and collaborated as a team. Now one monk went down to hill to fetch the water another monk would stand on the edge to pass on to bucket to the temple and the third monk would help in putting off the fire by throwing the water on the temple. So, There was no feeling of jealousy and selfishness in that team. All member were working for a single goal. As a result they were able to putt off the fire.

Management Lesson
Innovation

Transition from Working Method 2 to Working Method 3 led them to innovation.  When the monastery is on fire they realize that it is better to think in terms of  team goals rather than individualistic goals. Now they have introduced the pulley system in fetching the water. One would draw the water from river and tied to rope
,second one would pull the bucket through pulley and third would take the bucket inside the temple. In this way they can draw as much water as much they need without  any hassle. This shows difficult situation inspires ingenious solutions.

Team Work
The Three monks allow personal pride to interfere with the performance of daily tasks, each believing that the other two should be the ones to go downhill to fetch water. When a fire breaks out, they work together to save the temple. So, from this we learn that in an organization and in a team, its important to take personal
ego out of our self and  perform the duty at hand so that there is no regret later.

Productivity

While talking about productivity Working method 1 has less productivity than Working Method 2 and Working Method 2 has less productivity than Working Method 3.
To make it clearer, here is a table illustrating the productivity statistics in each case.

Tower Building Activity.

In this blog I will write about the SMART Goals and i will give the clear picture of Smart Goals with the help of a activity i.e. building tower. Ofcourse it was explained to us by Prof. Mandi in the very same way. He brought a bag which has two boxes in it. These two boxes has several small pieces of wooden cubes. With this pieces we had to build the longest tower possible. These small pieces of cubes were given to us in some of the previous classes also , but this time we are going to learn something different according to Prof. Mandi. These small pieces of cubes could gave us so much to learned , I have never thought about it.

With this small pieces of cubes and building the tower activity , I learned about Craftsmanship, Modern Management , some of the loop holes in modern management (which is prevailing in some of the organization) and setting the smart goals.

If a single person is building the tower with the help of cubes, then he is doing more of a Craftsmanship kind of work.
Craftsmanship :- There is no Organization Management in craftsmanship. If a single person is doing conventional work to support his per day living , then he is known as craftsman and this type of work is known as Primitive Work. Since it do not involve a group of person and he is doing no good for the society,  it is not an Organization Management.All the jargon of the management such as society, specialization, profitability, revenue, culture etc. will not be there in craftsmanship.

Modern Management :- Now to make us to understand the modern management, Prof. Mandi called some of the student, to be precise seven students to build the tower. But he kept one condition that only one person building the tower with his eyes blind folded , rest all others member will guide him to build the tower.
The process started, after few minutes a tower of seven cubes high was made, while in attempt built it more big it felled. Prof. Mandi then asked the experience of  the person who was blind folded and building the tower, he told that there was lots of suggestion from the different people that eventually it converted into noise and created confusion and as a result the objective of building big  tower failed.

Similar type of situation was also faced by me in my organization. Before joining to the institute I was working in TCS. I was working in TCS as Assistant Systems Engineer. It was my work to accomplished the coding part (most of the time) associated with the project. Systems Engineer was also there to help me. But in the hierarchy above me here there were Mentor, Team Lead, Project Lead, Program Manager. Some of times , it happened such that Program Manger would tell me to do something different than what had
been told by my Team Lead. It put me in dilemma to what not to do and what to do. Though there is always a way to worked it out,  but then it affects our efficiency. As Performance =Efficiency * Effectiveness , So decrease in efficiency by any amount lowers our performance. This kind of system still prevails in our organization. But then it totally depends on our managers to coordinate the team, implement Smart Goals to increase the performance Of Organizations.

Smart Goals :- “You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra
This time Prof. Mandi has asks us to implement the Smart Goals rules in Tower Building activity. Goal setting is very much important from the organization point of
view. It is because goal is the factor for which organization works for. Goal setting is one of the basic tools used by organizations to assist in setting a direction
and achieving it. Defining organizational goals helps to conceptualize and articulate the future direction of the organization.
Managers had to identify the potential of its employees before setting the goals. While Goal History is what that has already been achieved. So, Keeping this view
in mind manager has to define goals for the organization.
Here ,It is very important to note that Goal set should be more than Potential, Goal History and Goal Achieved. If this conditions are met then only it is known
as SMART GOAL.

S=Specific

A goal is specific when it provides a description of what is to be accomplished. A specific goal is a focused goal. It will state exactly what the organization intends
to accomplish. While the description needs to be specific and focused, it also needs to be easily understood by those involved in its achievement. It should be clearly
mention:

 What is to be accomplished?

 Where is it to be done?

 When is it to be done? 

M=Measurable

A goal is measurable if it is quantifiable. It will also have a target toward which progress can be measured, as well as benchmarks to measure progress along the way.
A measurable goal will answer questions such as:

 How much?

 How many?

A=Achievable

There should be a realistic chance that a goal can be accomplished. This does not mean or imply that goals should be easy. On the contrary, a goal should be challenging.
The organization's manager and employees agree that the goal is important and that appropriate time and appropriate resources will be focused on its accomplishment.
An achievable goal should also have some space for flexibility.

R=Relevant/Realistic

Goals should be appropriate to and consistent with the mission and vision of the organization. Each goal adopted by the organization should be one that moves the organization toward the achievement of its vision. As discussed earlier, goals are set by or in concert with the person responsible for achievement. It is important that all short-term goals be relevant (e.g., consistent) with the longer-term and broader goals of the organization.

T=Time

Finally a goal must be bound by time. That is, it must have a starting and ending point. It should also have some intermediate points at which progress can be assessed.
Limiting the time in which a goal must be accomplished helps to focus effort toward its achievement.

As a result of this activity this time our class has been able to build the longest tower (as compared to earlier attempt) as high as 24 cubes.So, in this way I have seen the practical examples of setting the smart goals and how the performance of the organization can be increased through it.

Goals should be spiral in nature and it should expand constantly.

Apart from this a very famous theory i.e. Pygmalion Theory was also discussed. According to this if we expect something more from any person then that person tries to do its best to meet our expectations. So, this in a way motivates a person to do something better and better.