Disaster Movie

So last week we were all given a cube to play with. Nor quite a Rubik's cube - this one was a 'navrang' cube with 27 removable sub-cubes, and removed they were.

Can probably be used as a pencil stand?

The first challenge was for two of us to volunteer and solve the cube - put it back into place with the given set of constraints - 

1. Each face of the cube must have all the 9 colors. Which also means obviously that none of the colors can be repeated on any face - since there are only 9 slots in each.

2. We only had 5 minutes in which to solve the cube in.

Since our professor had 2 sets of the navrang in possession, he invited two groups of two students each to come to his desk and try their luck. The 27 smaller cubes were clustered randomly on the table, and it took the teams more than a minute to even segregate and arrange the smaller cubes in some order. Neither of them came close.

And then Prof. Prasad took over.

Management Lesson #6: Identify. Organize. Solve. And Communicate.

He explained to us how a lot of problems, both in life, and in organizations, are similar in nature, multi-faceted, unexpected, and with time constraints. How they all have smaller, individual elements to them that have to be solved for us to solve the complete puzzle. And how, with the application of the right principles of management, we can actually, pretty easily, solve them. He encouraged the two teams to take apart their half finished, incorrect cubes once again, before returning to their seats. They did so halfheartedly.

Being a first-bencher, I got the best seat for what followed next - a methodical, yet elegant arrangement at the end of which our professor had brought back the navrang to all its glory, with surgical precision and a seemingly easy procedure.

He was timed at less than a minute and a half, and even that was because he had been explaining each step in the process.

The key to solving any problem, is organization. You organize your problems, and their sub-problems in order, and that is half the job taken care of. The first step is to segregate the similar elements of the problem - the like-colored cubes - together. Once you have done that, everything else falls into place, and your coming out successful is simply a matter of applying simple logic and common sense in each level, and avoiding any mistakes while you do so.

And then, you win!

Not all organizational problems are as difficult as they might seem at first look, and even the very difficult ones can be managed, provided you apply principles of organizational management to them. 

Another key concept in all of this is the importance of effective communication. The better you are at communication (either way), the better you learn how to do things, and how not to do things. You can watch and learn from the experiences of your seniors, or the mistakes of your peers, and nothing can teach you better. Unless it's name was T.Prasad, of course.

He pointed out how the solution to the 'navrang' is available in youtube for all to see, and yet how few people can actually solve it. Reasons included - 

1. The videos are not that popular - Reach is everything; unless you really reach out to the common man, how do you expect him to learn from you, and get better? Surely if Gangnam Style can do it, something this useful and interesting - Prof Prasad can explain close to 10 concepts in POM from a single cube solving session - can too, right? I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself.

2. Language barriers - How is a short, seemingly boring, home made hindi video going to teach a departmental store owner in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, to overcome the challenges he faces everyday? How would it encourage him to even click on to the link and watch it, in the first place? The answer lies with us. If each of us make videos of the lessons that we learn here, in our native languages, and market and popularize them via the social network, YouTube and blogs, maybe, just maybe, that store owner might be interested to try it out someday when it reaches his Wall!

3. Ineffective Communication - Just making the video in the desired language and getting it to reach your people isn't sufficient. You must communicate crystal clear what, why, and how you're going about doing, whatever it is, for whatever reason it is, and however it is, that you're doing. That, my friend, is effective communication. The videos currently available are not, and they have a huge scope for improvement. What are we MBA grads for?

So that concluded the session's learning from the cube, and we came out from the class, very impressed with our professor, our pride a little hurt that we couldn't solve it on our own in the first attempt, and lost in thought about how our own lives were similar to the cubes, and whether we would one day get them all right someday!

As always, thanks for reading, do leave your comments, keep thinking, and take care!

Ciao!

"Wait! Wait! Where d'you think you're running off to? You've still not touched upon the title of the post", you ask. "What's with the disaster movie? Surely you weren't misguiding us all this while, were you?"

Ok fine, here you go.

IMDB Bottom #2, indeed!