Principles of Management

Principles Of Management - Learning and Experiences

2012-09-28T01:43:00.000-07:00

Hershey - Company profile and Management Principles

2012-09-28T01:40:00.000-07:00

The Hershey Company, known until April 2005 as the Hershey Foods Corporation and commonly called Hershey's, is the largest chocolate manufacturer in North America.Its headquarters are in Hershey, Pennsylvania, which is also home to Hershey's Chocolate World.

History :

It was founded by Milton S. Hershey in 1894 as the Hershey Chocolate Company, a subsidiary of his Lancaster Caramel Company. Hershey's products are sold in about sixty countries worldwide. Hershey is one of the oldest chocolate companies in the United States, and an American icon for its chocolate bar. It is one of a group of companies established by Milton Hershey. Other Milton Hershey-established companies include Hershey Trust Company, and Hershey Entertainment and Resorts Company, which runs Hersheypark, a chocolate-themed amusement park, the Hershey Bears minor professional hockey team, Hersheypark Stadium and the GIANT Center. Most of the employees for the factory come from the surrounding counties, towns, and boroughs, such as Lebanon County, Hummelstown, South Hanover, and Harrisburg.

Milestones:

1893 visits World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and learns about chocolate machinery

1894 aware of the growing demand for chocolate, he started the Hershey Chocolate Company.

1900 sells his caramel company for $1 million, and devotes his attention to making chocolate.

1900 Hershey introduces the original HERSHEY’S milk chocolate bar.

1905 Hershey introduces the HERSHEY'S kiss

1908 Hershey introduces HERSHEY’S milk chocolate with almonds bar.

1971 Hershey introduces HERSHEY’S SPECIAL DARK chocolate bar.

1980 Hershey introduces Big Block/King Size versions of HERSHEY’S chocolate bars

1980 Hershey introduces HERSHEY’S SPECIAL DARK chocolate bars.

1994 Hershey introduces HERSHEY’S COOKIES ‘N’ CRÈME bar.

2004 Hershey introduces Limited Edition bars in HERSHEY’S white chocolate with almonds

Products :

Mission and Values :

Mission - Undisputed Marketplace Leadership
Vision - Great People Building Great Brands

Market share of products -

Market value (3/25/2011) 12,356.1 $ millions
Hershey Foods has 42.5% of the US chocolate market.Hershey sells products in 50 countries under 60 brand names including, Hershey's, Reese's, and Kisses In 2010, the company's net revenues were $5.67 billion with net income of $510 million. Additionally, Hershey maintains the right to manufacture and sell competitors' products, such as Kit-Kat bars, through licensing agreements with foreign Nestle (NSRGY) and the former Cadbury Schweppes (now part of Kraft Foods (KFT)).

Capacity of products -
Hershey's Production capacity
• 33 million Hershey’s kisses per day
• Total production capacity stands at 12 billion per year

Manufacturing plants -
The first plant outside Hershey, Pennsylvania opened on June 15, 1963 in Smiths Falls, Ontario, Canada and the third opened on May 22, 1965 in Oakdale, California.In February and April 2007 Hershey's announced that their Smiths Falls and Oakdale plants would close in 2008, being replaced in part by a new facility in Monterrey, Mexico. The Oakdale factory closed on February 1, 2008.Hershey chocolate factory in São Roque, Brazil was opened in August 2002.
Hershey also has plants in Stuarts Draft, Virginia; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Hazleton, Pennsylvania; Memphis, Tennessee; Robinson, Illinois and Guadalajara, Mexico.
Visitors to Hershey, Pennsylvania can experience Hershey's Chocolate World visitors center and its simulated tour ride. Public tours were once operated in the Pennsylvania and California factories, which ended in Pennsylvania in 1973 as soon as Hershey's Chocolate World opened, and later in California following the September 11, 2001 attacks, due to security concerns.

Key People –

Chief Executive Officer

John P. Bilbrey

President and Chief Executive Officer

Global Leadership Team

Humberto P. Alfonso	Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Administrative Officer
Michele G. Buck	Senior Vice President, Chief Growth Officer
Thaddeus J. Jastrzebski	Senior Vice President, President, Americas
Terence L. O'Day	Senior Vice President, Global Operations
Peter F. Smit	Senior Vice President, President, Asia, Middle East & Africa
Burton H. Snyder	Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary
E. Daniel Vucovich, Jr.	Senior Vice President, President, United States
Kevin R. Walling	Senior Vice President, Chief Human Resources Officer
D. Michael Wege	Senior Vice President, Chief Commercial Officer

Future plans –

The Future plans include ongoing updates to support process changes and to take advantage of enhanced functionality in each new AR System release.The IS
staff is expanding its use of root cause analysis to pin-point the causes of recurring problems and take action to eliminate them.The staff also plans to extend the service request application to provide a single point for requesting all IS services. Finally,
Hershey Foods is beginning to roll out Remedy-based applications outside of IS.

On January 30, Hershey announced plans to put $10 million towards solving child labor problems on West African cocoa farms by 2017. The money should also help farmers access educational programs and improve their cocoa yield.

SWOT Analysis –

Strengths :

- Extensive Global Market Base;Spread across more than 60 countries

- Largest Distribution Network across North American territory

- Enjoys government support and has major role in policy-making

Weaknesses :

- Criticism for changes in chocolate making processes as part of cost-cutting.

- Lead time for Operations much greater than its competitors.

Opportunities :

- Tapping into South-east Asian and Eastern European markets.Recently,Hershey announced that it would be entering Indian Market independently.

- Exploring the packaged foods and drinks market segment by acquistions in Europe and america regions.

Threats :

- Competitors like Cadbury,Nestle have already established markets in South east asia

- Packaged foods and drinks market provides lesser revenue generation opportunities as profit margin is very less.

Valley Crossing exercise

2012-09-28T01:27:00.003-07:00

Let me show you something innovative which happened in our college.

A video showing the Valley Crossing exercise which happened in NITIE below -

Hope you enjoyed watching this video.

Let me simplify this and Explain of valley crossing through this picture:

Every manager knows the power of Teamwork. In fact the very existence of a manager can be attributed to creation of Teams. The Valley Crossing exercise purely focussed on Teamwork.

Learnings from this exercise:

1) Concept of Super Teams & Self Manager Teams: Super Teams or High performance teams is a concept which has been successfully adopted by many big corporations like GE, Krafts food, Boeing etc. It can be defined as a group of 3 to 30 workers drawn from different areas of a corporation to solve problems faced daily. The valley crossing exercise had many characteristics of a super team like:

Participative leadership – different from the tradition approach of a authoritarian team leader.

Open and clear communication – Communication is the key to crossing valley effectively.

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

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

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

Defined 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.

Coordinative relationship – the bonds between the team members allow them to seamlessly coordinate their work to achieve both efficiency and effectiveness

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

2) Task Interdependence - It is the extent to which a group's work requires its members to interact with one another. We see that in the valley crossing exercise it is of utmost importance to be interdependent on each other so as to mitigate the risk and achieve the task at hand. This also has brings lot of perspectives to the Team performance in reality. What I have observed is that the interdependence increases as we go higher up the corporate ladder. As a worker or low level employee, we can usually get away with completing the task without much interdependence (even though effectively using the team's collective strength may increase productivity). But as we go to strategic level, it is almost impossible to go about a task without the expertise/skill/opinion of your team mates. Thus Interdependence and its effective usage is crucial for a manager.

3) The Flip side: Quite often we come across people who get their tasks done by their team mates. One of the flip side of team work is that our efforts may go unrecognised or even worse credited to the wrong person. In a competitive and performance oriented environment like ours, it is important to see through these ploys. Some of the good work practises that I have found in good team players in my previous organization includes:

Pro actively helping members in need.
Properly communicating the work done to superiors.
Pro actively using the teams strength for overcoming problems.
Effective participation in meetings and team events etc.

These are some of the learnings from this exercise.

Digital Media - Leveraging for Managers

2012-09-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

For those of us that use the net during work time, there are two types of networking sites, those that can aid learning, productivity and build business relationships and those that can slow or even stop work in its tracks. In this article, We explore the risks to individuals and businesses in the growing use of personal contact sites.

Personality types
For some of us, personal messages from people they know (or don’t know) causes excitement and fun. The feeling is almost addictive. What am I talking about? Well do you have your Gtalk or Yahoo messenger running while at work? Ready for people you know to chat to you? Do you feel compelled to talk when someone you know appears online? At best, this is a distraction; at its worst, it can disable some individuals from doing any work at all. But this is not the worst of it. With people we know our feelings and reaction to people we know is more often or not within reasonable control.

Are you ‘addicted’ to instant messaging?
Checking your email once or twice a day is one thing, but being permanently connected is quite another.

How can you tell if you are addicted to messaging? For some this can be quite easy. It is about how far you go to get your ‘fix’ of chatting with people you know.

If you work for a company that has blocked your favourite messaging site, then you use search engines to find alternatives – you use one of the ‘framed’ or java based sites, as the chances are your IT department has not blocked that yet… One of the better known MSN/ Yahoo replacements is ebuddy. This is a great site which allows you to access your instant messaging site and avoid the block on some company firewalls. When your company stops one you happily spend time searching for another.

Where are we spending our time?
Research has shown that the sites with us spending the most time on are: Myspace, Yahoo, Msn, ebay (being the top 4) with an adult dating site in the top 20. Sites like Myspace , Facebook and Youtube have little/ no legitimate place in the world of professional networking. As for dating or chat room sites…well that goes without saying. Yes, all of these can be great places to spend our hobby or down time, but as business tools – no.

Networking –v- Social Contact sites

Here let us make the distinction between the two types of networking sites. Networking sites tend to have forums and ways of finding people that have skills or experiences we are looking for. The forums tend to me places where people can share thoughts, questions and solutions, but they do so in a way that does not encourage a ‘conversation’. These sites include HRZone,TrainingZone, CIPD, TrainerBase, Linkedin etc.. Sites that can help us solve a business problem have a legitimate place in our ‘toolkit’ of solutions and organisations should encourage their use to help remain competitive and cost effective.

Are Blogs – social networking sites?
Yes and no. For me there are two types of blog – those that use social networking sites, and those that are on an individual’s professional website. For me that latter is a professional too, the former is not. In this day and age of personal networking, we need to be careful about our image.

What happens if we go for a job and someone ‘Google’s’ our name – and all they find is a blog with not very business like language on it?.

Organization Structure

2012-09-25T08:08:00.001-07:00

What is organization Structure ? What does it consists of ?

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.

How anyone can learn Organizational Structure?

The definition mentioned above may soun intimidating to some.Also,People have a notion that such structures are only found in organizations.Contrary to this popular belief,we learnt this concept by a unique approach in class.

We were asked to bring different kinds of plant saplings available in campus.By analyzing these saplings we were able to understand the various organizational structures and their aspects.

What are the 4 basic elements of Organization Structure ?

a) Span of Control: Number of people directly reporting to the next level in the hierarchy.

b) Centralization: Degree to which formal decision authority is held be a small group of people, typically those at the top of the organizational hierarchy.

c) Formalization: Degree to which organizations standardize behavior through rules, procedures, formal training, and related mechanisms.

d) Departmentalization: Organizational charts that specifies how employees and their activities are grouped together.

How does the Organizational Structure affect the organization ?

Organizational structure affects organizational action in two big ways.

a) Provides the foundation on which standard operating procedures and routines rest.

b) Determines which individuals get to participate in which decision-making processes, and thus to what extent their views shape the organization’s actions.

TYPES OF ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES

a) Functional Organization

This type of organizational structure:

· - Brings together in one department everyone engaged in one activity or several related activities that are called FUNCTIONS.

· - This leads to operational efficiencies within that group. However it could also lead to a lack of communication between the functional groups within an organization, making the organization slow and inflexible.

· - Mainly used by the smaller firms that offer a limited line of products.

· - Makes supervision easier as each manager must be expert in only a narrow range of skills. It also helps to group a particular set of people with the specialized kind of skill set.

· Disadvantages :

· i) As each department functional managers need to report to central headquarters (President), it can be difficult to make quick decisions.

· ii) Harder to judge performance because which department to blame when a new product fails.

· iii) Difficult to coordinate the functions of members of the entire organization as each department may have difficulty working with other departments in a unified way to achieve organizational goals.

b) Product/Market/Divisional Organization

- Brings together in one work unit all those involved in the production and marketing of a product or a related group of products, all those in a certain geographic area, or all those dealing with a certain type of customer.

- Can follow three patterns as described above:

i) DIVISION BY PRODUCT

ii) DIVISION BY GEOGRAPHY

iii) DIVISION BY CUSTOMER

c ) Matrix Organization/ Multiple Command System

- Employees have in effect 2 bosses ie. 2 chains of command. One chain of command is functional or divisional and the second is a horizontal overlay that combines people from various divisions or functional departments into a project or business team led by a project or group manager who is an expert in the team's assigned area of specialization. For example, many large companies have a corporate human resources division, with individual HR representatives stationed at local facilities. At the local level, the HR representative may report to the operations manager charged with responsibility for that facility.

- Bring together the diverse specialized skills required to solve a complex problem.

- Problems of coordination are minimized here because the most important personnel for a project work together as a group. They come to understand the demands faced by those who have different areas of responsibility.

- Gives the organization a great deal of cost-saving flexibility because each project is assigned only to the required people and unnecessary duplication is avoided.

- To be effective, team members must have good interpersonal skills and flexibility and cooperation.

Disadvantages :

· Everyone fails to adapt

· Without proper outlining of hierarchy it will not function

THE 3 MONKS - Management Learnings

2012-08-19T07:11:00.002-07:00

The subject has given me lots of surprising experiences . The activities which happens during the class gives us a practical example of the theories of management we are supposed to know. Last class we saw a video, a short animated chines movie. I don’t know about others but I loved it. It was a nice break from the usual classes

Please go through the video once.Link given below :

ABOUT THE MOVIE

Three Monks is a Chinese animated feature film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. After the cultural 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.

PLOT

A young monk lives a simple life in a temple on top of a hill. He has one daily task of hauling two buckets of water up the hill. He tries to share the job with another monk, but the carry pole is only long enough for one bucket. 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.

At night, a rat comes to scrounge and then knocks the candleholder, leading to a devastating fire in the temple. The three monks finally 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.

ANALYSIS

At one point of time the movie shows that two people are

trying to carry a single bucket, hanging from the bar held on

their shoulders. Each one tries to push it towards the other

in order to carry less weight. This is a common scene in

most of the organisations today where the employees want

to shift their responsibility to other fellow employees.

When asked in class about the solution to the problem of

sharing load, a lot of them came up with different solutions..

The solution was quite simple - measure the centre using a scale. It can be related to an organisation too. There is always a simple solution. The only problem is discovering it .

Next, we noticed in the video , how the process of bringing

the water uphill is changed when the second monk arrives.

The single monk was carrying water everyday, but when the

second monk arrived, they both started sharing the load.

They updated the process so that all resources are optimally

utilized – TEAM WORK .

But ….. the team work was short lived… They started

transferring their load to each other. This shows the violation

of the team work principle.

When the third monk comes, the quarrel become even more

intense. No one was willing to bring water and was ordering

the other person to do it. Infact, once when the 3^rd monk got

water, after climbing the top, he himself consumed it. This

shows selfishness in an organisation.

At night when they sleep, we see that the the monastery catches fire. There was no water in the monastery at that time. When this happens, all the monks forget their hostility and try to put out the fire. The dilemma of who will carry the water was quickly forgotten and a system arose out of the initial chaos. They all put out the fire quickly .

Moral :

Many a times crisis situations are encountered where any kind of system is in place. Infact one should be ready for it and should not keep anything for tomorrow and do their work today itself. In the end we see that the monks resolve the situation by fixing a pulley and dividing their roles - hooking the bucket, roping it in and transporting to the monastery.

Tower building - Goal setting and Management

2012-07-08T13:11:00.000-07:00

Data for Tower Building exercise in terms of No. of CUBES is given below.

	Factor 1 to 8	Scenario - I	Scenario - II	Scenario - III	Scenario - IV
1 & 2	Historical Tower height achieved by team	Low - 5 High - 18	Low - 5 High - 20	Low - 5 High - 21	Low - 5 High - 23
3	Achievable Performance - ( Estimate / Guess )	18 +	20+	22+	25+
4	Goal proposed by the Manager	18	22	22	18
5	Goal proposed by the worker	12	12	12	20
6	Goal Mutually agreed for building the tower between worker and manager with the support of the manager	15	22	18	15
7	No. of cubes Tower manager and worker team could build / achieve at the end of the exercise	18	18	18	18
8	P O T E N T I A L T O W E R H E I G H T	20	25	25	30

Potential tower height as per my understanding is stated above.

Sl. No.	Measure for Managerial Excellence	Scenario - I	Scenario - II	Scenario - III	Scenario - IV
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8	1. Gap if any between Tower height Performance so far achieved and Achievable performance of tower ( Factor 3 and 7) 2. Gap if any between goal proposed by the manager and mutually agreed goal by team ( Factor 4 and 6) 3. Gap if any between goal proposed by the manger and the goal proposed by the worker ( Factor 4 and 5) 4. Gap if any between goal proposed by the worker and mutually agreed goal by team ( Factor 5 and 6) 5. Gap if any between achievable performance and potential tower ( Factor 3 and 8) 6. Gap if any between performance achieved ( at the end of the exercise ) and goal mutually agreed by manger and the worker ( Factor 6 and 7) 7. Gap if any between performance achieved ( at the end of the exercise ) and achievable goal ( Factor 7 and 3) 8. Gap if any between performance achieved ( at the end of the exercise ) and the potential ( Factor 7 and 8)	Acheivable performance = Performance of team. This is a condsiderable situation with drawback being that limits are not being pushed. Team performed better than what was earlier decided mutually. Manager has high expectations. Employees are complacent. Mutual agreement lies in middle of worker and manager aspirations. Exceeded expectations. Yes.Gap does exist.This is a condsiderable situation with drawback being that limits are not being pushed.	Acheivable performance > Performance of team. Team did not push their limits and performed below expectations. Team performed as what was earlier decided mutually. Manager has very high expectations. Employees are complacent. Mutual agreement is completely manager aspirations.He has been able to convince workers of his goals. Performance below expectations. Yes.large Gap does exist.Team did not push their limits and performed below expectations.	Acheivable performance > Performance of team. Team did not push their limits and performed below expectations. Team performed not as good as what was earlier decided mutually. Manager has very high expectations. Employees are complacent. Mutual agreement lies more towards manager aspirations. Workers have been successful in negotiating a little. Met expectations. Yes.large Gap does exist.	Ac heivable performance is much greater than Performance of team. Team did not push their limits and performed very badly and below expectations. Team performed not as good as what was earlier decided mutually. Manager has low expectations. Employees are motivated and have set high expectations. Mutual agreement is lesser than worker and manager aspirations. Poor manager will eventually lead to complacent employees. Exceeded expectations. Yes.very large Gap does exist. Team did not push their limits and performed very badly and below expectations.

Future of Education - Khan Academy

2012-07-04T02:22:00.000-07:00

In a world where number of students is more and number of education institutes considerably less, there is a case of under developed potential in students. Education is a basic right and it should be available for one and all, not to select individuals. Khan Academy is one great example of this principle.

About Khan Academy :

Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by Bangladeshi Americaneducator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies 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.

The project is funded by donations. Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization, now with significant backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google. Several people have made US$10,000 contributions; Ann and John Doerr gave $100,000; total revenue is about $150,000 in donations. Additionally, it also earned $2,000 a month from ads on the Web site in 2010, until Khan Academy ceased to accept advertising. In 2010, Google announced it would give the Khan Academy $2 million for creating more courses and for translating the core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages, as part of their Project 10¹⁰⁰. Khan Academy has eclipsed MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) in terms of videos viewed.

Now, what connection does this educational organization with management principles? Look closely and you will observe it does apply lot of managament principles.

Mission and values -

Its mission is "to accelerate learning for students of all ages."For the vision he sees for the future, he states "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"

Creative problem solving -

Khan Academy has provided a solution for the wide gap between demand and supply in education by leveraging internet as means of mass communication. The teaching style provided by Khan Academy is revolutionary as compared to other formats. It uses the internet to provide lectures which can be viewed anytime anywhere.

Innovation -

Drawings are made with a Wacom tablet and the free natural drawing application SmoothDraw 3, and recorded with screen capture software from Camtasia Studio. Khan's audio narratives are recorded with a Samson C03U USB Multi-Pattern Condenser Microphone with a miniature desk tripod. This is an innovation pioneered by Khan Academy.

Funding -

Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. Thus it generates funds required for its working by seeking contributions from philanthropists and organizations. Donations have come from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ,Google,Ann and John Doerr.

Quality -

The education sessions provided by Salman Khan are of same quality as that of any session provided by MIT,covering all the essential elemets.

Theory X and Theory Y Manager

2012-06-26T11:43:00.004-07:00

Principle of management today started with the description of two contrasting models of workforce motivation.These models are theory X and theory Y.
Theory X and Theory Y have to do with the perceptions managers hold on their employees, not the way they generally behave. It is attitude not attributes.

Based on the perception a manager has towards the employees, four scenarios are possible shown in tabular -

Case 1:

the employees are Lazy and the manager assumes his employees are Lazy.
In this situation the employees are lazy and the manager also thinks that they are lazy and has no faith in them changing into hardworking employees. Work goes on as a daily chore with no scope for growth for anyone.In my experience,Our computer support team were an example of this case.They had a habit of procrastinating work and their manager with “Chalta-Hai” attitude was partly responsible for fostering an unproductive work environment.
In such a situation the manager needs to develop a more responsible role and lead from the front.

Case 2:

the employees are Good and the manager assumes his employees are Lazy.
In this scenario,there is a serious case of misinterpretation between employees and manager. This is the most dangerous scenario.This situation may lead to a downfall of a team .It is possible that even hardworking and efficient employees turn into lazy and inefficient employees because their work goes unappreciated and their efforts are not rewarded. If a manager does not understand the strengths of his employees and fails to manage them, making them lose interest which will downgrade their performance and output.
I have worked in a team which is a good example for this case.We were a efficient team of 50 people until a new project manager was assigned to us.He had an unhealthy attitude towards the work and office environment.This lead to employee dissatisfaction and lesser outputs.In a span of 6 months,Our team was reduced to a team of 10 people with clients’ considering of shifting this project to another company.

Case 3:
the employees are Lazy and the manager assumes his employees are Good.
In this case,a manager through his managerial skills and positive attitude can bring out the best from his employees.
His task is to lift the standards of his employees by various means to ensure the desired outcome is achieved and if a manager is successful in doing so he is an effective and a successful manager. He should lead by example and should not lose hope and faith in his employees.
An example for this case is while i was a lecturer in a small college,the class assigned to me had students who had potential but were not focused towards their studies.I took it as a challenge and motivated them to study hard and enjoy the subject.I utilized different means and in the end,a change was visible in the students.This lead to better grades in their university results.

Case 4:
the employees are Good and the manager assumes his employees are Good.
This scenario is the most easiest as not much effort is required by the manager to obtain the desired results.The work goes in an auto pilot mode and is a win-win situation for all parties involved.It is also the rarest case seen in an organization.
Personally, I have never encountered such a situation but from what I have learnt from other communication channels,Companies like Google and Tata Motors foster such a work environment by various activities.

Goal Setting

2012-06-25T06:08:00.001-07:00

In the first class of POM, we experienced the tower building game .Although we have played this game in our adolescent days,this time it had lots of insights to offer. The tower building game involved putting one square block over another and achieving the maximum height possible till the tower collapses.

To set a goal,we should keep the follwoing things in mind -

Before the player could begin the game , the class was asked about the number of blocks before the tower will collapse. The students came up with varying responses for the number of blocks. In management,this is known as the goal setting activity for a process where individuals set the appropriate or desired target based on their perception of the activity. A student was randomly chosen who had himself set the target as 10. The student performed the exercise and the height achieved was 18 blocks. from this exercise, we got to know that goal should be set in such a way that it realizes the potential.This can be realized only when a human’s perceived limits are tested and it performs beyond the limits.

A modified case for this exercise maybe where the individual will be blindfolded and helped by some other open-eyed individuals for building the tower. Now the targets will be realized as this is a new challenge. It was observed that:

1) Some of the students lowered the target from the previously stated one .This is not preferred since the organization shouldn't lower their targets despite the hurdles which come across as this portrays a negative outlook.Also,this strategy does not work in the longer run for the growth of the company.

2) Some of the students retained the target. This is preferable as the organization continues to work towards the defined target despite the hurdle through motivation and team effort and effective co-ordination,

3) Some increased the target. Ideally, organizations need to expand even during tough times when others are contracting and avoiding risks. A good example can be Apple , which during recession perceived as threat to many used as opportunity to expand their market share and generate more products like iPad.This lead to increased profits and increased market share.

Based on on how an individual responds,we can generate a graph depicting different parameters-

In this graph,

A is Potential of an individual.As it can be seen from the graph,it is limitless and beyond measure.

B is goal set for an individual by the manager.

C is achievable goals assumed by the individual for himself.

D is goal actually achieved by the individual.

As it can be seen ,A,B,C,D are in descending order.This is a perennial problem for every manager and every manager finds new ways to overcome it.

Overall, the tower building exercise helps in understanding an important element in management - Goal Setting Process and how an ideal manager responds to it.

It also is a realistic example for the above mentioned graph.