MARK BRADSHAW forwards a forward: Put about 100 bricks in some particular order in a closed room with an open window.
Then send two or three candidates in the room and close the door.
Leave them alone and come back after six hours and then analyse the situation.
If they are counting the bricks, put them in the accounts department.
If they are recounting them, put them in auditing.
If they have messed up the whole place with the bricksm, put them in engineering.
If they are arranging the bricks in some strange order, put them in planning.
If they are throwing the bricks at each other, put them in operations.
If they are sleeping, put them in security.
If they have broken the bricks into pieces, put them in information technology.
If they are sitting idle, put them in human resources.
If they say they have tried different combinations, yet not a brick has been moved, put them in sales.
If they have already left for the day, put them in marketing.
If they are staring out of the window, put them on strategic planning.
And then last but not least, if they are talking to each other and not a single brick has been moved, congratulate them and put them in top management.
Jokes apart, dont think management today can be so bad.
They would be out of business in 2 winks if they just talked and did not do any work.
Indira gandhi times was a prime example… all PSU thrived and despite sleeping managements, they somehow managed to service the economy.
Post liberilization when markets call the lots, they fell like nine pins. Only those with proactive managements are still surviving and making good money too.
The below pasted story published in DNA makes an interesting reading
No clear bottom line: The rise and rise of CEOs
Gautam Adhikari
Saturday, January 13, 2007 21:52 IST
Last week, a friend sent a slide show on ‘Corporate Lessons’. The first lesson — the one I’ll share with you, the rest were smutty — said: A crow was sitting serenely on top of a tree all day doing nothing. A rabbit came by and asked whether he also could just sit all day doing nothing. The crow said, “Sure”. The rabbit sat beneath the tree and did just that. Presently, a fox appeared, pounced on the rabbit and ate it up. The moral of the tale: If you want to sit around all day doing nothing, make sure you sit very, very high up.
In the world of commerce today, if you are a Chief Executive Officer sitting on top of a corporation holding the right job contract, you are not only at the crow’s safe and high perch if you don’t want to do much, you can make sure of coming out a winner even if you try to do things and make a mess of it all. That’s what happened when Robert Nardelli, erstwhile CEO of Home Depot, a US home improvement retailer, was pushed out by shareholders disgusted with his dismal performance. His compensation for being sacked was a cool $210 million in cash, deferred stock awards and other payments.
A CEO is, of course, much more than a bum who sits around doing nothing. That’s a mere caricature of the growing number of men — mostly, but also a few women — who were not a particularly prized category known to the world until a couple of decades ago. Today, they symbolise the ultimate career goals of countless young men and women graduating out of management schools as well as liberal arts colleges and academies. The best CEOs are not only adept at managing finances to ensure the robustness of corporate bottom lines, they also have empathy for people’s sensitivities, understand global trends and acquire skills to manage diverse teams while allowing free play of individual talents.
I would imagine the majority of CEOs in the world work their backsides off not in anticipation of being sacked — and therefore salivating over fabulous unemployment benefits — but in anxiety over their performances, which are closely watched by shareholders and promoters. Their professional lives are like the inside of a pressure cooker about to boil over and they usually have little time for fun or family.
That is why the best of them command high prices. In India, they are becoming a scarce commodity in an economy growing at a supercharged speed. New enterprises are coming up and coming in. Existing ones are under increasing pressure to perform or fold up. A recent study by a human resources consultancy firm, Redileon, says that enterprises in India will be short of at least 1,000 CEOs in the next two years. Inevitably, compensation packages for India’s limited field of CEOs are whizzing up faster than the stock market. In the business process outsourcing sector, for instance, the median salaries of chief executives have leapt from Rs40 lakh per annum four years ago to Rs2.20 crore now.
Also inevitably, as the halo of power around the heads of politicians and IAS officers begins to dim on the heels of economic liberalisation, CEO power rises in public evaluation, especially in this city which is the Rome of corporate life in India. TV screens and party pages of newspapers these days are full of pictures of CEOs, and their partners or spouses, doing the night rounds along with the rest of the glitterati. Their job switches, their private life styles, their tastes in food and friends and their rivalries are all covered breathlessly by the media. They twinkle high in today’s social astronomy.
Funny, when I was starting out in life as a young adult my friends and I had not even heard the term CEO. Okay, okay, I am a decrepit grizzly, but it wasn’t until the eighties that the term became an aspiration for young folk. We grew up in a controlled socio-economic environment and people who headed companies usually owned them, though even then there were exceptions from the professional class who rose to lead enterprises.
Today, the super-manager is not necessarily a business scion who has inherited his wealth or status. He or she is usually a career professional who runs a company on behalf of shareholders and is, or should be, answerable to a board of directors, though in India we have quite some way to go in the structure of capital-holding before CEOs, or even boards of directors, become transparently accountable to a wide body of shareholders.
The worry is will the CEO’s ascent to power generate the kind of problems that earlier leaders — generals and dictators, aristocrats and bureaucrats — created on their ways up to social dominance? Ian Buruma, a Dutch social analyst, writing in the Financial Times last week, fears that future strongmen and tyrants might be men in suits who think they can run everybody’s lives as efficiently as they can run corporations.
Ah, if only life had a clear bottom line…
This has nothing to do with the said article, but is a query about something entirely different. From the posts and comments here, the Mysore angle is clearly evident. I am a Bangalore-based writer, currently working on a travel guide style book on Mysore. I wondered if the Mysore network can be activated, thru this, to give me a list of your fave places – eat, drink, visit etc. esp eating places – like what to eat where. Kindly do get in touch with me and I shall be happy to credit you in the book. Please visit my website for contact details.