Great Lies in Management - My take on Dilbert Principle

Currently reading The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams.
Cutting the crap, would say that this is one bible for fun for all the managers out there.

A slap on the face of corporate culture, this book runs us through the lies and truths that we encounter or rather we have already encountered in our time serving a company.
If you think, you are not an asshole with a big mouth and small brain (and even if you are of this category) read this book.

Quoting from chapter 4 : Great Lies of management

"Your input is important to us"
For a manager, the following equation...
Employee Input = More work = Bad

As a ... powerless employee ... its fun to give a suggestion like this :
"If you care about the health of the employees, you should ask the CEO to fund research on the effects of fluorescent lights on fertility"

...thouroughly impractical but the manager cannot discard it offhand....

Now look how this sentence can be dissected part by part
If you care (FEELING) - about the health ( FEELING about what?) - of the employees (for WHOM?) - you should ask the CEO ( WHICH UPPER LEVEL? ) - to fund research ( DO WHAT?) - on the effects (what EFFECTS) - of flourescent lights ( effects OF what?) - on fertility (effect ON what?)

Ever heard of the PIP kind of programmes in a company (hey if PIP is something one the leading IT firm in India has) and one of the items in the performance appraisal goal sheet sometime back was -  how many PIPs have you raised in the last 6 months

So what you can do is to list down possible items for the above dissected parts and create various valuable(?) suggestions for the manager to show.

So we can do some exemplary work here:
FEELING:
care, empathetic, sympathetic, feel, are interested in improving,

FEELING ABOUT WHAT?
health, morale, emotions, food, productivity, proficiency, efficiency, attendance, absence, physical appearance (hot topic eh!!! :) ), etc etc

WHOM?
employees, staff, non working staff(?), furniture, cubicles, computers (:-)), dogs...

WHICH UPPER LEVEL?
CEO, HR head, Policy Head, Recruit Head, yadda yadda yadda

DO WHAT?
fund research, set up a committee, hire professionals, create a team to tackle..., brainstorm ( managers love it), hold a meeting, increase or decrease something(?) of something(?), bla bla

EFFECTS?
(F.O.=find out)

EFFECTS OF ____ ON ____? ( this is the funny part)
OF increased level of sugar in the apple juice being served as a part of the free promotional campaign for the newest sponsor for the company ON level of blood pressure
OF unwanted lices on the old chair ON lowered level of sleep
OF ever changing format of goal sheet ON stability of thinking of the employee
OF bad spam detector ON productivity since most of the time goes in deleting the spam mails in outlook
and so on....

A smart combination of these will definitely give you a horde of suggestions that the manager will outright won't be able to reject on the grounds of incompetent, as they are very much valid when it comes to those buzzwords you shall be using.

Give it a try...

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Narita Local Train Terminal

We moved our luggage to the local train terminal. We bought a SUICA card ( or a PASMO) which is used for auto fare adjustment for train,bus travel in tokyo city. This card is also useful to buy from vending machines and can be used at general stores (conveni).

We bought it for 3500 yen, thats approx. Rs. 1970 during that time. Although there is no meaning in trying to convert yen into Rs. and judging the expensiveness in japan, but as usual we do it. So this card is valid till the charge becomes zero. Its a swipe card and can be swiped on the entry and exit stations



Some pics inside the local train we took to reach our next destination - Monzen Nakacho

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For more info on Suica Pasmo Click here

Japan Kaizen Study tour - Narita Airport

At Narita Airprt in Japan, where we reached at 7 pm on March 15th, local time Japan. Airport is unbelievable clean. This was the time when we started experiencing the polite nature of the japanese people and the disciplined nature (although on the first day itself i would be facing amjor crisis).

Dr G and Shinjo-san were present at the terminal to receieve us. Shinjo-san has been helping Dr. G during the previous tours as well.

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Japan Kaizen Study Tour

Under this head, I will keep posting some of my experiences that I had during my tour to japan.

This tour was scheduled starting from March 14th (departure from India) till 26th March (fly back from japan)

FLight that we took was Thai Airways. This was the first time i was travelling abroad and was my first international flight experience. Quality wise the flight can be rated at 6.5/10. Food was excellent and I appreciate the service of the crew despite huge number of passengers.

We had a connected flight from Mumbai to Bangkok  which took almost 6 hours and another from bangkok to Narita (Japan) airport which took around 4 hours. I hope I am correct about timings. We spent around 3 hours at the Bangkok ariport in between the flights.

Bangkok Airport, named as Swarnabhumi International Airport- has a lot of innovative designs. Looking from outside it would look like a DNA stucture replicated on four sides.

Some of the inside pics at Bangkok airport.

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Japan ICT Sessions

THIS comes as a rather late entry from me. I must have put this together earlier.

In the month of March, I got an opportunity to visit Japan as a part of Kaizen Study Tour for the year 2009, under the guidance of Dr. Shrinivas Gondhalekar (or Dr. G as we all call him, Founder / Expert at  KANZEN institute Asia Pacific ) and Dean (Operations) @ Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research, where I am currently pursuing my Post Graduate Diploma in Management.

This trip is a part of one the initiatives taken up by Dr. G to promote and enhance relations with Japan and make us aware of the Japanese way of living and working.

I had always been fascinated by the way japan has developed over the years after 2nd world war post which the japanese morale had been destroyed completely. Everyone knows about Hiroshima and nagasaki attacks. With my current post graduation, learning Japanese language (Nihon-go) not only as a part of curriculum but also a part of the relationship development.
Utilising ICT to have carefully charted out chat sessions with the students from Keio University in Tokyo is also a plan of this. We used to have weekly chat sessions with japanese students in groups, which focussed on specific subjects and engaged in constructive chat with a lot of information exchange. These used to happen on thursdays morning 8 AM.
A multitude of subjects like Education in Japan and India, World of mathematics, Beauty of two countries etc.
Pre-relationship building happened during  these chat sessions.
Prof Hasebe from Keio had facilitated these sessions.

These kind of sessions help in nurturing the following objectives:
Developing trust amongst the Japanese students and professors
Understand a bit about Japanese culture
Assess the level of english as a language in japan.

These sessions ran for a period of two months, each of which was followed by feedback to be submitted on the Keio blog.

Th students we interacted in these sessions were the same ones we would be meeting in our trip to Japan

Back to blogging

I have been inactive so long here, that I had forgotten I had this blog..

Partly this was because, I think I was too busy in my MBA life and trying to make sense out of it. I completely ignored the fact it is necessary to retain knowledge that gets constantly created in the mind and till date we have not found the way to make sure we don't forget the things we create in our minds

Freedom after a caged life

Last sunday I had a chance to visit the Taraporewala Aquarium at Grant Road, Bombay. Its a small structure in itself. I had last visited it when I was a small kid(kids are small always). May be I was in 7th grade then. Actually I had gone to meet a friend and we made out a plan to visit it.

The last time I had gone there it all I remember was some small ponds and fishes in it. Very unclear picture. This time I was actually fascinated by the new fishes I saw there. There's this whole skeleton of a bog whale there in the room when you enter the door. In the middle of the whole floor lies that thing. I saw that there was a lot of renovation done and new fish ponds were added.

Fishes are such  simple and genteel animals. Just floating around the ponds wherever they get place to. The only pity I had for them was that they were caged and the ponds not big enough for their full free float in the water.

Sometimes I wonder, we make our lives like these small ponds and then cage ourselves in it, although the cage does not seem to be visible to naked eyes, to neither of us or the other people around us. Sometimes we like to live in that small net and keep ourselves confined. Human mind does not revolt against something spontaneously if that "something" is not directly visibly causing any mantal or physical pain. And in this case we have ourselves made up this cage unconsciously so we do not make a move to break it.
It take a lot of courage to break this kind of cage, because we are left in a free flowing world once we break it and are left in all awe.

I think if these fishes are put in the sea or river, they also must be feeling the same. Being in a pond for a long time, if they are let go into big river they must be feeling intimidated and afraid of all the big water around.

But still the freedom you get when you are out of the cage is invaluable....