Tower Building: Craft vs Modern Managaement

This blog narrates my experience and learnings from the second lecture by Prof. T. Prasad. Even this lecture was unique in its own way and provided us an opportunity to grasp the concepts from the live exercise of Tower building!                                  

                                                               

                                                               

Everyone had to first estimate the maximum height of the tower and the person who quoted the highest tower started building it.  We encountered following 2 different scenarios -

Scenario		Proposed Count	Actual Count
1	Single person	15	22
2	Blindfolded person and his manager	22+	27

Scenario 1 : When there was a single person building a tower, he bears the entire responsibility for it. Although, he enjoys the freedom of doing things his own way. This also led to the discussion on goal settings. 

While setting the goals, an important point to be considered is it is always advisable to under-promise and over-deliver rather than over-promising and under delivering.

Scenario 2 : In this case, at first, everyone thought that the height of the tower would be less than that in the first case. But Prof. explained how this is not the case in such situations as the pressure of failures is shouldered by the management. And the above chart rightly justifies it.

 

                                            


A single student building a tower                                                       A blindfolded student building a tower with his instructor.

                                                                              

Upon analyzing both the situations, we discussed the advantages and disadvantages for the various parameters. The table below lists these parameters and the conclusions. 

Parameter	Craft Management	Modern Management
Workforce	Single person doing an entire work.	Multiple persons working on separate modules.
Skills	Increase	Decrease
Productivity	Low	High
Satisfaction	More	Less
Innovation	Less since a single person is responsible for possible failures.	More as employees have insulation from risks because of the presence of upper management

And hence the modern management is important for innovation and growth of the company.

Thank you..!