tumblr hit counter

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Problem solving & Decision making:

                 Problem solving & Decision making are two major things which influence an organizations growth.The job of manager lies in handling these situations with business acumen and bringing out fruitful outcomes from it.One more challenge yet to come is how to implement the decision??Is it by individual or group??Here are the four possible situations an organization can experience in decision making and its implementation.

 
  • Individual Decision,Individual Implementation
  • Individual Decision,Group Implementation
  • Group Decision,Individual Implementation
  • Group Decision,Group Implementation
         
               Out of four situations the last one is more complex as it involves many people in taking decision and implementing.It will be difficult to bring people on common consensus.

Steps in Decision Making:
  • Estimation Analysis
              -Valuing                                                 
              -Priority Setting                                              
  • Problem Analysis
              - Information Gathering
              - Problem definition 
  • Solution Analysis
              - Idea getting
              - Decision making
  • Implementation
              - Involving others
              - Planning


Comparing stages of Problem solving and Decision making:



Two major categories of problems can be:
  • Rich and Poor differentiation
  • Simple and Complex
Problems which seem to be "Tough" are not actually tough,it is the persons view on how he/she is analyzing it.What ever the problem is we should be ready to handle it. Taking the challenge is more important than coming up with solution.
          This is a critical phase where any organization experiances it often.The approaches and the implementations are the factors which distinuguish an organisation from each other. 
          Only Solutions can be classified as simple or complex but not the problems.






Valley Crossing & Management Principles in it

                  Making difficult task easier as a piece of cake is possible with excellent teamwork.3 persons crossing a valley is a good example of it.This scenario depicts how 3 people cross a valley,what difficulties they faced and how they have overcome it with their team work and co-ordination.



Stages they have undergone:
Safe - Both the legs of the person have full support
Half Risky – One leg in the air and the other leg has support
Full risky - Both the legs are in the air without any support
Half risky – One leg is in the air and the other leg has support
Safe - Both the legs have full support




9 different stages 3 people undergo while crossing the valley

Lessons Learnt :

 Significance of each member in a team:
           In this situation all three are equally responsible in their contributions for the overall task completion.Roles of all three members are similar but not same, and equivalent in terms of total effort & risk.All 3 member Roles have equal distribution of 
Risky situations (1)
Half risky situations (2)
No risk situations (2)
           Similarly in an organization,all roles are designed for equally strong persons and there is no weaker or stronger requirement in any specific role.The onus lies on the team members to communicate and feedback across the members instantaneously.Interdependence among the members can be exercised in crucial situations

Preparation and Execution:
         All the 3  members are systematically trained for all the steps and, while crossing, they communicate and coordinate with each other through a various kinds of sounds and other signals.

Team Excellence:
        Team excellence comes through proper designing of team tasks, correctly assigning team roles, and preparation and execution of the tasks. Thus, excellence is designed by the managers and executed by team players with trust among themselves.


Friday, August 2, 2013

     

Creating a World Without Poverty:Yunus Principles


          
      Grameen Bank founder and CEO, Muhammad Yunus has succeeded in his current fascination with individualistic myths of wealth and poverty. Many policy-makers believe that poverty is "simply" a problem of individual behavior. By rejecting the notion that poverty has structural causes, they deny the need for collective responses. Helping the poor is pernicious because such aid undermines the incentive for hard work. This ideology is part and parcel of neoliberalism.
           
              For neoliberals the solution to poverty is getting the poor to work harder, get educated, have fewer children, and act more responsibly. Markets reward those who help themselves, and women, who comprise the vast majority of micro-credit borrowers, are no exception. Neoliberals champion the Grameen Bank and similar efforts precisely because micro-credit programs do not change the structural conditions of globalization—such as loss of land rights, privatization of essential public services, or cutbacks in health and education spending—that reproduce poverty among women in developing nations.


Micro-credit:
               Yunus, a Bangladeshi banker and economist, pioneered the idea of setting up a bank to make loans to the "poorest of the poor." The term "micro-credit" reflects the very small size of the loans, often less than $100. Recognizing that the lack of collateral was often a barrier to borrowing by the poor, Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in the 1970s to make loans in areas of severe rural poverty where there were often no alternatives.





                 The concept of micro-credit started gaining popularity after Muhammad Yunus. The success of Grameen Bank’s micro-credit model, of which rural women and Self Help Groups (SHGs) formed more than 94% of clientele, incited an ontogeny that culminated in the arrival of many such institutions around the world in the last decade.



The Grameen Bank toasts its successes:
             Micro-credit advocates see these programs as a solution to poverty because poor women can generate income by using the borrowed funds to start small-scale enterprises, often home based handicraft production. But these enterprises are almost all in the informal sector, which is fiercely competitive and typically unregulated, in other words, outside the range of any laws that protect workers or ensure their rights. Not surprisingly, women comprise the majority of workers in the informal economy and are heavily represented at the bottom of its already-low income scale.



             Micro-credit programs do nothing to change the structural conditions that create poverty. But micro-credit has been a success for the many banks that have adopted it. Of course, lending to the poor has long been a lucrative enterprise.payday loan operations, and loan sharks charge high interest rates precisely because poor people are often desperate for cash and lack access to formal credit networks. According to Sheryl Nance-Nash, a correspondent for Women's e-News, "the interest rates on micro-finance vary between 25% to 50%." She notes that these rates "are much lower than informal money lenders, where rates may exceed 10% per month." It is important for the poor to have access to credit on relatively reasonable terms.



            However large or small their income gains, poor women are widely believed to find empowerment in access to micro-credit loans. According to the World Bank, for instance, micro-credit empowers women by giving them more control over household assets and resources, more autonomy and decision-making power, and greater access to participation in public life. This defense of micro-credit stands or falls with individual success stories featuring beggars using their loans to start some sort of mini small-scale enterprise, perhaps renting a stall in the local market or buying a set of cookies.
            Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus won his approach towards his principles of management to banking, reinforces the neoliberal view that individual behavior is the source of poverty and the neoliberal agenda of restricting state aid to the most vulnerable when and where the need for government assistance is most acute. Expanding the state sector to provide the rudiments of a working social infrastructure is, therefore, a far more effective way to help people escape or avoid poverty.

Learnings:
                    
         -  Yunus approached where there were opportunity(market segmentation),for example when conventional banks approached the rich but he went to the poor people and created an opportunity to generate business. in the same way when project is done one must know where the opportunities are and penetrate it and generate business.

       -    In a team when a risk has to be taken it must be calculative and within limits.Yunus did this by lending a loan in a particular limit.

       -     In a product marketing unique points are to be followed which stands unique from others so that business is done.For example: yunus used usp which differenciated them from competitors(conventional banks) as follows:

        a)many banks (99%) reached only men while yunus approached women
        b)many banks asked for collateral where yunus dint ask for collateral .