“MAHA MANDI” a classroom on the streets of Mumbai !!

Saturday morning greeted Mumbai with incessant rain, overcast sky with no sign of the sun. The rain lashed down on rooftops of big complexes, buildings with relentless force showing no signs of abating and thereby showing no mercy to those who would have loved to enjoy the day outside with their family and friends.

But this day witnessed one of the biggest events organized by Nitie students-Maha Mandi.

The day began with the inauguration ceremony witnessing the presence of Ms. Sonam Bajwa (Charismatic leadership) which saw participation from NITIE, SPJIMR, KJ Somaiya and other renowned colleges.  The “mandi experience” was still a mystery to all of us.

On the day I along with my team members set out for Andheri in bus arranged by college. Bus was full to its capacity with enthusiastic students.

On getting down at Andheri,we began to look for a customer whom we could sell.Questions like What are these people up to? Are they busy? Is this person looking grumpy? Is this one too arrogant?  were all racing through our mind.

There we met our first customer-A grumpy looking person in mid 50s.We decided to give a try and to our utter surprise we managed to sell a toy costing rupees 200 for rupees 250.

Then we made our way to Andheri station where a person approached us on his own and began inquiring from where we came from and seem very interested by Maha Mandi.We sold him the Jodo block.So far it was cake walk for us.

Then came the difficult time when we got people who listened intently to what we had to say but in the end the price was either too much or the product was too risky for their kids as they might swallow up the toys.We made our way to Bandra where we sold maximum items on Link road.

 

Finally at Juhu we sold off a few items.
Total sales in 4 hours=2800 rupees.

Learnings from Mandi experience

• Before Mandi,we were a bit overconfident-specially after the success we had after the first two sales.But then we realized that patience is the key.
•  The toys like Tangrum and Jodo are perfecgt examples of how the education system in India needs to be.
• We also learnt that targeting the right customer is a very important thing.
• From one's facial expression,a seller has to guess whether he is a potential buyer or not.
• During conversation never bring the price of the product first.Rather generate interest in the buyer's mind
• Patience is a virtue and must be present in a seller.
• Never give up.Always try.

Another interesting observation:

If we can sell 2800 in 4 hours, then we can sell 6300 in a day of 9 hours,189000 in a month,22.68 in 1 year.Who said that you only have to do MBA to earn this sort of a package.

In Nitie, through the unique teachings of Dr. Mandi we get to know what quality education is all about,what is real teaching and most importantly how to implement what we learn in our day to day lives.

JAI HO MANDI

TOWER BUILDING EXERCISE

Tower Building Exercise in IM21 Section B by Dr. Mandi

Organizational behavior is all about understanding the employees in an organization.PUC-productivity , understanding and control of an employee is essentially what OB is all about.

In the tower building exercise we learnt two very important concepts of OB

• Effective organizational management is possible only when the doers and thinkers are separate entities.
• Closed eyed performance should be better than open eyed performance in an organization.

The basic organisational structure with a worker at the lower level of the pyramid , followed by a manager and in the end, the General Manager of the company , with the worker wearing a blind fold, which is very synonymous to the actual situation in an industry wherein a worker is just asked to follow instructions without questioning or suggesting ,and it is the manager who takes the decisions .

In this exercise the blindfolded guy represented a worker who was just following the instruction of his manager to place blocks one over the other.The blindfolded person could not "see"what he is doing which is the actual situation in an organization where a worker does not know why is he doing a job .He just does what he is told to do by the manager.In the end he managed to place 16 blocks together just by listening to his superior.

This exercise also put the communication skills of a manager to test.

Learnings:

The manager later on agreed that if he had communicated in a better way,more than 16 blocks was possible.

This should be the mentality of a manager who always believes that:

• "POSSIBILITY > REALITY"

The best is yet to come.

• Also, Where the gap exists or areas of improvement should be identified.

• Then Why the gap exists question should be answered.

• Lastly,What should be done to fill the gap between possibility and reality must be answered.