Lecture 1

We had our first lecture of Principle of Operations Management by Dr T Prasad. I had heard a lot about him and his style of teaching from the senior batch. He is famous in the college by the name of Professor Mandi as he conceptualized the one of a kind event Mandi for students wherein they learn the reality of the market. Students hit the streets of Mumbai to sell products of different NGO’s with the dual objective of earning money for the organisation and learning how to market and sell a certain product. Dr Prasad had already taken two lectures in the B section of our batch and they had praised him and his style so much that I was very excited before the class started.  We had two back to back sessions. In the first session we had a very generic and broad discussion. He showed us the video of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”. I love Pink Floyd; their other two songs that I like are “Comfortably numb” and “Mother”. I believe the purpose of that video was not merely entertainment but to get the point across that cramming and following the herd are not the way of going about when it comes to education. I agree with him here as I too believe that. Our present education system leaves very little space for creative development.

The second point that Dr. Mandi touched upon and which impacted me the most was his philosophy that if “you are smart enough to spend then you are smart enough to earn”. I am currently reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and even this book talks about how one should be able to make best of the situation, how important it is for business sense to prevail.

Mandi and Tower Building

Tower Building going on

In the second lecture of the day, we were informed about the idea “Mandi”. Dr Prasad presented a video depicting what Mandi is and how students work. It looked very exciting and useful. It is a very good opportunity to actually go out on the road and sell a product. The amount of learning and exposure that one gets from an event like Mandi is tremendous. I am also looking forward to be a part of Mandi this year.

After this we played a game, in which one person had to stack cubes of same size one upon the other. With such a simple game like this, the way Dr Prasad explained the management fundamentals was so ingenious. We were asked to predict what will be the no of cubes that person will be able to stack. Then using this number and the final result, he explained what kind of managers we are and how a good manager should think and act. He stressed upon the point that a good manager has to believe in the abilities of his worker and should always motivate him. I also realised why my senior always used to talk nicely to the workers at our project site. He would give them a task and constantly talk to them, telling them how well he was doing and that the task is achievable.