Saturday, February 27, 2010

What is Management all about?

A two word answer "(Right) Decision Making”.

I will give one of my experiences to illustrate the idea of decision making. In one of my exams in the course "Operations Management" a section of the question paper contained multiple choice questions.

For one of the questions none of the choices is answer. I wasted my time on it trying to fit one of the answers. After realising that I spent a lot of time I convinced myself that option(d) is the nearest and marked it. When I checked the evaluated paper I got zero marks for the question. I asked the professor. He told that none of the choices is answer. Then I said "(Yippee) Give me the marks”. He replied back, “Why, because you marked some option? You are not studying management to make some decision. You got to take right decision. When none of the options available is the right answer you should not go for any option. Learn to make appropriate decisions. This is the penalty for not making right decision”.

My education taught me many concepts, frameworks and models. It never taught me,” Understanding the problem and addressing it”. I always loaded my gun with all those concepts, frameworks and models. Let us call them bullets. Whenever I found a problem I shot at it continuously with a hope that one or the other bullet might hit. I hope that I unlearn this by the end of my MBA course.

There is nothing like “Yes and No” or “No right answer, No wrong answer”. I don’t buy this school of thought. For any problem there is one solution. It might be that you haven’t yet identified that one solution.

Why waste so many bullets? Take time to aim the target and hit it with the right bullet!

4 comments:

Suman Y said...

bagundi ra analysis ...

Ravi Shankar said...

hey dude...i would say...right or wrong is entirely subjective...and the way u suggest is objective..which makes it a bit inappropriate in practice..theoretically u can always say that u r lookin for best etc..in utopian terms..but reality is far far. and when u rite or wrong..it includes the ethical and moral aspects which in reality again..not much is attributed..i would rather say...all the management theories are never proved to the fullest extent possible...its all about makin decisions in the lite of an utopian expectations in the organizational context..

Ravi Shankar said...

hey dude...i would say...right or wrong is entirely subjective...and the way u suggest is objective..which makes it a bit inappropriate in practice..theoretically u can always say that u r lookin for best etc..in utopian terms..but reality is far far. and when u rite or wrong..it includes the ethical and moral aspects which in reality again..not much is attributed..i would rather say...all the management theories are never proved to the fullest extent possible...its all about makin decisions in the lite of an utopian expectations in the organizational context..

Sree Sree said...

The difference between leader & manager is, a leader do good things, a manager will do things in a good way.

A good Manager is a person who leads people who are much more intelligent than him.

After a break of two years my sis got an interview. she is having very good communicative skills. After the interview, those people gave a job as team lead instead of jr. position, which was not expected.

For the first two weeks my cousin & her friend use to help & work for her. She use to say, iam a good manager as iam making two people work for my company. That was a fun side.

I feel a manager is a person who manages things in a right way to achieve the decided goals.

yep, ok in field one will face challenges and had to answer with decision making.