How management thinking can hurt sometimes!

Increasingly there is a recognition that management education may cause more harm then good. Harvard Business School is the favourite punching bag here, where the problems on the Wall Street are balmed on the Harvard style educated manager (HBR, PBS, Debate). Blaming ills of Wall Steet is however frequently attributed to personal greed, rather than management education. Based on my own personalm experience I propose to identify specific aspects where I can trace problems to what we had educated managers with in the management schools. The cases and instances that I identify (below, and seek tio build repository of the same overtime) converge into a central idea — missing the goal post — the ambiguity around the objective of any exercise or actvity! If there is a confusiion or lack of calrity about what we want to fundamentally achieve, management education will guide us to make a choice and decide on our objective, which could possibly be an incorrect choice as there is no broad guiding principle.

Take the case of cleaning a city. The city of Indore achieved a remarkable feat and ranked first in the national cleanliness survey for seven years in a row. A lot of hard work by public managers, citizen participation, alignment of politics and bureaucracy, and innumerable otehr factors contribute to this high achivement and its sustenance. After the intiiual bouts of success, the focus moved to sustenance. The initial efforts undertaken on misison mode, now required a management approach. And multiple efforts in this context were initiated. Cleanliness was a result of at soucre seggregation, door to door collection, effective transportation, waste processing, and a centralized coordination of the whole of the system. Soon, someone came up with the idea of optimizing the trasnportation as the city was running up huge diesel bills and as coverage increased, shortage of transport vehicles was felt. The management solution lay in optimizing the transport system in multiple ways. I enumerate a few below

a) Route optimizing and rationalization: This was aimed at increasing coverage and reducing distance travelled. Whiloe optimizing this, garbage was not collected when convenient to the public, but when the truck would reach your house as per the rationalized routing.

b) Vehicle capacity rationalization: To carry more garbage and reduce number of trips, the city decided to purchase trucks of larger size. 1.5 ton trucks were substituted with 3 and 5 ton capacity trucks. This would bring about operational effeciency, but it compromised the primary garbage collection objective. Putting garbage into larger trucks was now more difficult for the citizens, and it often spilled out. These trucks blocked streets and lanes, and garbage trucks which people used to welcoime before were now resented as they would block all movement.

c) Airport Facilities: The Indian airport sector has woken up to this perspective, though a little late. In the last 2 decades Indian Airports in a bid to improve and upgrade, had lost their way. Non-Aeronautical revenue which was aimed at making the airport viable for upgradation took central space, and the airports moved their focus from being a transport terminal to a shopping archade, and painfully the shopping archade principles took precedence over the transport utility. In a bid to fix this, in the year 2023, led by the Civil Aviation minister the balance was restored, when he openly identified six agenda items for airports to adopt, with one of them being — Move away from shopping mall structure and bring back passenger mobility to the front. The parking at the Indore Airport is an example which is still to be fixed. The road access side of the airports moves double the number of people who pass through the airport (for every passenger, there is a driver of the vehicle which dropped or picked him/her up), however scant attention is paid to this aspect. At Indore parking fees collection has been given precedence over smooth flow of traffic and convenience of passengers. The circulation area needs a complete redesign to smoothen out vehicle flow, rather than force vehicles to stand on the road waiting or wasting precious fuel moving around to save getting into the parking lot.

d) MORE INSTANCES to follow

So what is the issue… A typical management arena problem. A big task broken down into smaller parts (Adam Smith’s all pin manufcature story), and then we put it all together, in the hope that we would achieve cooperation (incentive) and coordination (rationality). But, departmenal or functional optimization results in a sub-optimization levels, compromizing the overall objective level. When does it happen? When there is a lack of clarity around the higehr level objectives or missing identfications of how the sublevel goals would contribute and align with the overall objectives- a common problem in public management systems, where multiple objectives exist simultaneously, and functional alignment is hard to achieve.