Management

By Madan Lamsal

Whether you say your company has no problem or many problems, in both cases you may be wrong. Because if you say that your company has no problems than you might have not recognized in what form the problem may have come to you, and if you say you have many problems than you have done a mistake by thinking every minor obstacle to be a big problem.

Many people in leadership positions forget their real job, which is to delegate authority, stay in full control, and create for themselves as much free time as possible so that they can reflect calmly and deeply and decide what the biggest problems are in their own domains and what should be done in the future. In the cases of most Nepali companies, the CEO wants to decide even the bill of 500 rupees. Therefore, he becomes the busiest person on earth.

Why is it that professionalism is not developing in any sector of Nepal - be it in government offices or private companies? Because, the so-called decision-makers are busy in either customary rituals like attending seminars or talk programs or in office meetings, conclusions of which, in most cases, are never implemented.

Therefore, it is rightly said that in Nepal, management exists only at the top. In many instances, there is nothing like number one, number two and so on in managerial hierarchy. The management seems to comprise a number one and a lot of number tens. All the major decisions and most of the minor ones have to emanate from the very top. The idea of a number of managers at different levels giving decisions and running operations according to a corporate policy and corporate objectives is still an ideal only talked about mainly in managerial seminars. In real life, the managers seem to be implementers of the decisions given by the top boss. Examples are in plenty to prove this point. Many top level foreign, specially Indian, managers, who had a very good track record in MNCs are declared as ‘failures’ by some Nepali business houses. It is obvious that there was too much interference from the top boss to those managers.

Similarly, let’s have a look at an advertisement published in the Kantipur Daily dated on May 15, 2000. One of the 4 star hotel of Kathmandu had sought a General Manager for which the space for the ad was only 6 x 9 cm. It symbolizes how the hotel of that category gives importance to its GM.

With this type of attitude at the top management, people in many businesses and workplaces make no attempt to think about or investigate into possible problems, instead they run around in circles doing this and that in an attempt to cope with the sudden breakdowns and accidents that crop up daily. They spend their time scrambling to accommodate demands for temporary production increases or rushing about trying to deal with production decreases, modifications to plans, and trivial complaints. Policy is frequently changed when managers get a bee in their bonnet and become deluded into mistaking small problems for big ones. Because they have only a superficial information.

It is the responsibility of managers, staff or subordinates to gather the data and information needed for exposing problems. Ant the top management has to inculcate the suitable culture in the workforce - from senior manager to the shop floor worker. Because there is no way for quality control or any other type of control to exercise without having the relevant numbers and amounts, i.e. the facts, at one’s fingertips.

It is the responsibility of all employees for searching out areas that require improvement and reporting these to their superiors. However it is vital for those in positions of authority from company president down to group leader to be constantly problem conscious. It is only with this approach that drastic solution of the really serious problems and innovative improvements are possible, say the Japanese experts.

Based on AOTs Training Course

Creative Thinking

By Narayan Manandhar

Creative thinking could be both ways round - creatively thinking and thinking creativity. In a world of "knowledge organizations" with "knowledge workers", if there is any work to do then it must be to think. Our brain is programmed to do basically two things. One is to remember the past and other is to think for the future. Remembering is far easier than to think, therefore, we are much more inclined to remember than to opt for a difficult process of thinking. However, on May 24, the difficult thought process, at least of this scribe, was shattered by two disciples of Edward de Bono - Peter Low and Linda Low - when they spoke on Creativity in Business to a large gathering of businessmen and managers. The thought process of this scribe was shattered for a couple of reasons. First, the gathering proved that a genre of our managers is interested in improving its thinking process. Second, there is a demand for this, as people are willing to pay for it. To find 180 odd managers coming to attend, within such a short public notice, a three-hour lecture for a payment of Rs. 1000 each is amazing. And the managers were basically from the private sector business organizations who know the real value of money. Also the managers gathered were of a different breed, a new generation of Nepali managers.

Peter Low began his lecture by noting that our society has emphasized so much on improving IQ and now we are in the age of IT. What we need now, said Low, is QT, that is, quality thinking. From working employees we need to shift towards thinking employees. Since thinking takes place inside our head, it symbolically means that in an organization, the quality thinking must first take place at the top. In a three hour long lecture, using wit, humour and anecdotes, Low literally mesmerized the gathering. He spoke on various issues like the possibility of training on thinking, realizing intellectual potentiality, lateral thinking, conception of ideas, de Bono’s system of "Six Thinking Hats", creative thinking, and provocative operation. Low said, " In a competitive world nobody will think for you. Even if you have one, you have to pay for him/her. However, with a little extra effort, you can make a large pool of your employees to think for you and generate new ideas."

In the past, we discovered new ideas either by chance, mistake or sheer madness. Low called for de Bono’s Provocation Operation (PO) that is a deliberate way of challenging an established fact to generate new ideas. Lateral thinking is cross cutting the pattern. Basically, our mind is programmed to think vertically. Confronted with a problem, either we resort to some established solution or to our past experience. It is not necessary that past will repeat in future. Vertical thinking is basically logical and rational. Works of Daniel Kahneman and Amors Tversky have shed important insight into the irrationality of human behaviour. Behavioural economists are slowly taking the seats of rational economists. Refuting the idea that creativity thinking is not brainstorming, writes de Bono: "Just as the ability to use the reverse shifts is part of every driver’s driving ability, the ability to use creative thinking should be part of every thinker’s thinking skill." De Bono’s classification of human thinking process is divided into six colours, popularly called, "six thinking hats" – white, yellow, red, black, green and blue - each denoting the particular thinking function of the brain (see the box). A good decision-maker always looks at the problem by wearing and changing different "hats". True to the spirit of "provocation operation", Low stated that critical thinking is "getting out of the box". And getting out of the box requires asking questions like: What is the box itself? How do we first get into the box? How do we know we are inside the box? And how do we come out of the box? Creativity thinking provides a careful understanding of the human mind, often termed as a black box. Traditionally, managers separated their functions into "doing" and "thinking" and minutely specialized in doing function. Now it is time to think on their thinking function. And it is not that really easy.

(The program was jointly organized by Jyoti Group, GTZ and Nepal-German Chamber of Commerce and Industry - NGCCI)