Will Management Ideas Ever Rule Management

It is Not Learnings from the success of WoW Momo, it is the Question that we should ask Who has not heard about WoW Momo of Kolkata- perhaps everybody who is foody! Who does not know its growth story? We may not find anybody. Started by two Kolkata boys, Sagar Daryani and Binod Kumar Homagai, I will prefer to address them as boys instead of persons as they are too young in Indian standard, in 2008 with a capital of Rs 30,000. Without repeating their success stories, which can be read at https://yourstory.com/2017/11/starting-garage-kolkata-wow-momo-130-outlets-9-cities . And at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj1lInurghE I will just mention some figures: Sales: First day sales, Rs 2200, and by the end of the month, touched Rs 53,000 in a day. Salary of the chef: Rs 3000   per month as a part-timer, now the same person gets Rs.1.5 lakhs per month. Manpower: From three, two promoters and one cook, now they have over 700 people employed in backend productions, and ov...

Most organisations strive for improvement and want to challenge the status quo and introduce change-large or small. Often the motivation comes from peer group firms. Research suggests that only 20% of the change management projects succeed. The cause of failure of the change management projects differs from organisation to organization. But all follow some prescribed models. Several models do exist in literature as if there can not be a standard model.   At the same time most of the organizations, when trying to introduce a new product or try to enter a new market, follow the age-old process- 5 Ps of marketing. When an organization try to introduce a “Change” they are basically selling an idea to its internal stakeholders- employees of all categories. Anecdotal evidence suggests that when it comes to resistance, management talks about main resistance from Union as they are vocal but ignore soft chronic resistance from managerial staffs. In this conversation we will examine i...

Summer internship for MBA students is a standard practice of Business Schools across the globe. Some institutes take internship seriously and some don't. Generally, the trainees are assigned to an in--house executive of the company where the student will do the internship. A faculty from the institute is also assigned to each student as a mentor. In the majority of the cases, the engagement of the faculty mentor is limited. and the in-house mentor is also too busy to spend time with the mentee. The whole process is a self-learning exercise. The summer internship is for two months. Students generally get the assignment after a week. The nature of the projects vary case to case- it may be a transactional job like selling of Credit Card to organizing promotional events. Of course, some gets quite interesting assignments as well. As a result, the take away from summer projects vary widely. Experience suggests irrespective of the nature of the project students get a very narrow exp...

After 100 years of establishment of International Labor Organization, I think there is no doubt that trade union movement- collective bargaining helped improve the life of workers, created the middle class, which helped the economy to grow by sharing the gains of productivity. And reduce inequality, thereby advancing social justice. One may say this the things of the past- it is no longer an issue in the gig economy as everybody is empowered to make his life better, and there is an abundant opportunity. Let us take stock of the situation from past to present. The new volume of ILO indicates that higher the percentage of employees collectively determined wages lower is inequality, and the opposite is also true. In other words, fewer workers are covered by collective bargaining higher is inequality. One of the reasons that helped the world to recover from great depression is not by chance. It is through the intention of the public policy that encouraged collective bargaining. Whil...

The title is a very old one, nothing new - but reexamining with new evidence is worth considering again. Wallace Donham who introduced the case method in HBS in 1920 realized after some time that ," it was too indifferent to larger societal ills, too insensitive to the labor market, and thus to economic prosperity and equality among workers". In other words, the creator realized the limits of his creation. But today's management educators, particularly in India, understand Donhamism more than Donham. Of course, it is not an exception the same thing applies to Marxism- some Marxist know Marxism better than Marx. During two years, a Harvard MBA student study, analyze and discuss about 500 cases. And revenue from selling a case study is a major source of earning for HBS. Credit goes to HBS to create a class in which business school across the world desire to belong. There are some schools where you have to use HBR cases whether as a faculty you like it or no...