Alignment

Continuing his trait of bringing in seemingly unrelated artefacts into class,  Prof.Mandi walked into class with a chunk of magnet and asked us, “Why does a magnet attract?”. After many unsuccessful attempts by us at giving a good answer, the answer finally came up as the magic word – Alignment.

What is alignment? 

Alignment is done by regular ordering of repeated a number of times in a set process. it is in this ordering that the source of the power of any aligned entity lies. A Magnet has its power because it can align innate magnetic forces in metallic atoms. So, magnets align natural forces. 

Managers align people and power. They align tasks and objective. They synchronize both time and space. Management is Music, not noise. It is like the conductor of grand orchestra, where each instrument contributes to harmonious music. Only proper alignment would lead to music, else it would result in noise.
A Manager aligns human forces to get work done. In effect an organization is a force that is aligned. The bigger or better an organization, the more perfectly it is aligned.

Here we come to a very important management lesson – Management by Objective.



 Management by objectives (MBO) is a process of defining objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to the objectives and understand what they need to do in the organization in order to achieve them. The term "management by objectives" was popularized by Peter Drucker in his 1954 book The Practice of Management.





The essence of MBO is participative goal setting, choosing course of actions and decision making. An important part of the MBO is the measurement and the comparison of the employee’s actual performance with the standards set.

In most organizations, there occurs alignment during appraisal/goal setting cycles, where the goals of the employees are aligned with the vision/mission statements of the company.


For greater clarity on the topic we compared two different styles of management we had previously studied in class – the blindfolded tower building and the three monk collaborative water collection. The major lessons we drew could be summarised as shown below:

	Blind Tower Building	Three Monk Collaboration
1	Management Present	Management absent and replaced by autonomous management/ maintenance
2	Loading is High and Low	Loading is more or less equal
3	Hierarchical set-up	No Hierarchy
4	Control Mechanism	Consensus Mechanism
5	Control with Top Management	Consensus among all

We ended our discussion by comparing two Indian Tennis stars - Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupati and understanding why they were unable to cooperate and work. 

We concluded that the main reason was a skill set mismatch. Multiple skills could come as a disadvantage as the ability to exercise choice comes into the picture. Management should figure out which all skills to hone & nurture and which all to get rid of or discourage.

          Thus, the most important take away in today's class was the concept of MANAGEMENT BY ALIGNMENT.