Monday, January 3, 2011

The Best Manager: A teenager?!?

Teenagers have problems studying management, but guys , look at the life of a teenager. The teenage is probably the most complex part of a person's life. Just look at the amount of things that happen in a teenager's life in just one day-a ZILLION emotions go through the teenage mind in 1 hour!!!...jealousy, love, hatred, admiration etc etc etc!!...a teenager has to try to MANAGE his life with his parents, his crushes, girlfriends....while under pressure ...there is career pressure, peer pressure...and yet these young people amidst all this tension..find time to share a joke about each other's life...no matter what the amount of pressure might be, we still cope up with it...face challenges(cutthroat competition for getting admissions, or in a talent contest;can be compared to competition faced by organisations producing the same products) and overcome them in the most innovative way possible....So doesn't that make us like the best managers ever?!!!?!

Lets just compare our life to the real manager(a good manager): he is also under a lot of pressure from the heavily demanding work environment, his superiors, his own goals,etc and amidst all such pressure, he achieves the organisational targets in the most work efficient and innovative way possible, motivates his subordinates, shows his leadership qualities and makes sure that every managerial function is done in the best way possible.

So why run away from the subject?....for every teenager, it should be child's play!!There is an entrepreneur hidden in everyone of us....we just need to be confident and get the best out of us!...People who don't agree with me can compare the principles of management with a youngster's life and would realise that almost all the principles are applicable here as well.Still don't believe me?.lets take an example:Lets take a class of students.A class where the lecturer asks questions, interacts with the students but as we will see in every class, only a few of the students interact with the teacher...lets say about 20% of the students in the class interact with the teacher regularly , the rest of the class only answers the questions occasionally.so those few students,those 20% of the students contribute to at least 80% of the answers to the questions asked by the lecturer..Iam sure you will agree that the same thing happens in every classroom..Now people would say big deal!!...what does that have to do with management.?..my answer-dude!!...this is an example of Pareto's 80-20 principle..one of the most successful and most fundamental principles applied in business, a secret to success of many big entrepreneurs(i'll discuss this principle in detail in my next article)...So my point being...most of us have been applying the Pareto Principle-an extremely important business principle in our life-without even knowing about it.Need any more questions be asked?
So i guess we can conclude ...that our life is 1 big organisation..and at every stage of our life we are a manager,not only at the teenage level(of course at the teenage level the challenges r more complex,or maybe it's because Iam being too partial since iam a teenager as well:P)..but at every-level: a toddler, a pre-teen, a teenager or an adult..and with time we get more experienced about the organisation(our life) and over time we become quite a veteran with all the tricks of the trade up our sleeve.
 So next time you read that management is an art, a science....make sure you add 1 more feature to it-management is our daily life.....and every youngster-is a daily manager!!

Thursday, December 30, 2010

MANAGEMENT:MY PERSPECTIVE

Every wannabe entrepreneur needs to have proper knowledge about management.I mean c'mon,whether in school or college, we've been taught over and over the FEATURES OF MANAGEMENT, THE SCOPE, THE OBJECTIVES,THE FUNCTIONS,...etc etc etc!!..Enough to make a lot of students give up on the subject!!Students start thinking its a really hard subject, waste hours memorizing the points...n still don't score too well!!

Look, are you trying to tell me Dhirubhai Ambani wasted his time learning all these points before he became one of the top businessmen in Asia??I DONT THINK SO!!...My point is if you don't do too well in your management subjects, doesn't mean ur a bad manager!All u need for management is experience and as Agatha Christie puts it through her most famous creation Hercule Poirot: your little GRAY CELLS, or your brain.
Experience is the best teacher when it comes to management and add a pinch of common sense in it...and u got it made!!!Some who score great in class in such subjects may argue and say studying theory is very important...my answer to them would be...if you are doing well in class and u think its necessary to learn the principles, go ahead and continue doing it...but that doesnt mean in future u'll go on to become a better manager than the people who are not doing so well  in business studies...I personally have studied theory and am still studying...and doing pretty well in it...but i still believe time teaches us everything!
so stick around for my views on mgmt. ...the daily life view!..the simple view!:)