The 'Learning' Tower of NITIE...

          The feisty Professor entered the class with the same sprite as that of his first lecture. And thus began the second lecture of Prof. T. Prasad. We were asked to make ourselves comfortable on the floor, and we happily obliged. He introduced us to the next activity of POM i.e. to make a pillar with small cubes in such a way that the only a single cube can be placed over the other single cube. The idea behind the activity was to understand the difference between the old and the new styles of management.

Part 1:

Here only one person is involved. He/she needs to build the tower on his/her own, without any help from anyone.

Part 2:

Here two persons will are allowed to build the tower, wherein one of them will actually place blocks over one another and the second person will direct him with the same.

          To make this exercise more amusing, Professor asked the volunteers to bid an amount before they started building the tower. Whoever bid the highest was called upon the dais to build the tower. The catch was that if the bidder didn't stick to the number of blocks that he had said he would build, would have to forgo the money that he had bid. And then the game began. The person from Part-1, started building the tower, with intermittent ooohs and aaahs from the eager crowd. He was successful in putting together a tower of 22 blocks. A commendable job indeed. All of us thought that the team from Part-2 won't be able to reach even near 22 blocks. But, as they say, 'Cricket aur NITIE mein kuch bhi ho sakta hai', the team was able to build a tower of 24 blocks.

Following are the things that we learned in the lecture about the New and the Old School of Management

Parameter	New School Of Management	Old School Of Management
Work	Here two people are assigned the work, with one of them physically doing the work and the second person guiding the first one on how to do it properly	Only one person does the entire work
Skill	Since, two people are doing the job, low skill is required from each person as compared to a single person doing the job	A person with high skill level is required to do the job
Division of Work	The technical and the functional work are separated	The burden of the entire work is on a single person
Innovation	Better Innovation, since two people are involved	Innovation might not be at par with that of New School of Management since only one person is involved
Productivity	High	Low

                We can thus, from the above table, clearly see that the New School of Management is better than the Old School of Management in terms of Work, Skill, Division of Work, Innovation and Productivity.