Learning from Lecture 1

We had our first lecture of Principle of Operations Management by Mr Mandi. I had heard a lot about him and his style of teaching from the senior batch. He is famous in our college by this name  as he conceptualized the one of a kind event Mandi for students wherein they learn the reality of the market. Students hit the streets of Mumbai to sell products of different NGO’s with the dual objective of earning money for the organisation and learning how to market and sell a certain product. He had already taken two lectures in the B section of our batch and I have seen the videos of that class so I was very excited before the class started.  We had two back to back sessions. In the first session we had a very generic and broad discussion. He showed us the video of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”. Which talks about the rigid European system of education at that time and the purpose of that video was not merely entertainment but to get the point across that cramming and following the herd are not the way of going about when it comes to education and even our present education system leaves very little space for creative development.

His line "Aaj ki roti aaj hi kamaani h"in the lecture will stay with me for the rest of my life. He made us understand the importance of money and how we should earn our bread and butter on daily basic because if we are spending some amount of money in a day then we should be smart enough to earn that much money if not more in a day.

For a manager Goal setting is one of the most defining attribute and it can decide the future course of any organization. All the goals set should be SMART

S for Specific

M for Measurable

A for Achievable

R for result oriented

T for Time Specific. 

To better understand the goal setting we had a very interesting play in our class.Students were asked to create a tower using small identical cubes. Although most of the students were identical in their technical prowess , it was intriguing to see that there was a lot of difference in how the people were setting the goal for themselves. The range of cubes one can use to construct the tower without falling was almost varying from 10 to 25.

So one student who has set his individual goal as 10 was asked to come and start constructing the tower. To the utter surprise of himself and the whole class, he constructed the tower using 17 cubes  without falling. later he was asked to set a new goal if he was blind folded. He reduced his goal again this time to 10.

Learning from  this play was that most of the times managers tend to set a goal which is far less than what can be achieved and real potential of the employees. This underestimation not only results in low productivity but also refrains employees from knowing their true self potential. So the Goal setting should be always done keeping in mind the achievable target.