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CONCRESCENCE & ADDING VALUEBY: PROCYON MUKHERJEE
I was straddled with this question a few days back when I was quietly sitting at my davenport,looking back at the tidings of the day with almost a half closed mind, cernuous to the wide rangeof subjects attempted in the last ten hour routine. It came as an abstersion in an otherwise repetitivedenouement of picking up scattered pieces of thoughts, taking some of it home, leaving some forthe next day’s drill.
“How much value did I add today?”
I thought about my shop-floor confrere and imagined how his hands and feet and his eyes hadfollowed the instructions on the “Lot Ticket”, the variant of the process card, with the attention andthe skill that he had gathered over the years that he had spent on the shop-floor and had turned apart of the process “input” into an “output”. And this I could well confer that he had done the samefor all the seven hours in the shift betwixt keying of data on the “central technical database”.Incontinent, I could accite innumerable examples of such “hourly rated” work which in real termsis nothing else than “value-addition” in the truest sense. And this was not at all abstruse for me tofollow whereas the question was, in spite of having it to concern myself and none else.Concrescence of energy, both human and abstract converts an input into an output, thus creating“value”. It is simple till we bring in the measures and the yardsticks; sequester the elements of “value” concerning managerial content as distinct from the contents of labour. I remembered myprofessor defines “Value addition” as the sum of PBDIT & Employment Cost but seldom had Ithought deeply till this moment confronted by the featous question, “How much value did I addtoday”?Going back to my colleague who adds value for seven hours in an eight- hour shift, I could see awell-knit structure in form of an activity- value matrix. While each element of his activity could bebroken down, each microelement of value created could be tracked, measured and monitored withnear precision. Facsimile of such microelements of work throughout the value-chain constituteswhat we call the value-addition by human labour.But what is difficult and incondite is the measure of the managerial content of “value-addition”and this is because it is devoid of structure and concinnity, complex and inconsistent. The degreeand extent of managerial value addition over short or long periods of time have never reallycrossed my mind till this moment when I heard the question. I wanted to delve a little bit more onthis and I preferred to keep my thinking de-linked from sensitivities related to this subject.Managerial value addition starts with the managerial attitude towards work. Here again thenecropsy of the primitive examples touched my mind and the rancour of an example cited by mylearned professor Ranjan Das of IIM Calcutta, on this subject reprised unknowingly. He had comeacross a letter written by a CEO of a Fortune 500 company at U.K. to another at U.S. which ranlike this:
 
“The other day I was swimming at the London Hilton pool when I noticed a Japanese swimmer bymy side. He was looking at me more often than not, which looked a bit awkward. Later when I wasdrying myself at the poolside he came forward and took out his waterproof business card from hisswimming trunk and handed over the same to me introducing him.“Dear me, how do we confront these Japanese at the market place who carry their business cards intheir swimming trunks?”Then our professor told us the essence of this new attitude of the managers of the new millennium.Thinking about business for twenty-four hours of the day is what is “in”; configuring time for thebusiness is “out”; keeping awake so that not a single business opportunity is missed at any time.I shall start with this fundamental premise that time is not restricted by the boundaries of the work place. It is therefore left to the manager to decide what he intends to do with his time. We oftenmake this fundamental mistake by starting and finishing the day by specific hours of the clock.Thinking per se can never be confined to specificities at the work place, influenced by actions andreactions and nothing beyond. That would be far too biased by imponderables, traipsing the logicput forward by the intermediaries. It is important though that the process of thinking and action isin tandem with the organizational processes at the work place, but there is no binding to takingthem beyond the limits as defined or comprehensible so far by dictums or routines.There is however no discernment to the idea that work place influences our managerial behaviormore than anything else. This is because we channelise our thoughts and actions based onobservations of activities and processes. Therefore to me managerial value addition starts from theanalysis of our daily observations. Unfortunately we often restrict our observations to events, shop-floor activities, meetings, training sessions, correspondence, etc. But observations can go beyondall this.Managerial observations start with interactions in the dyadic form. Dyads play a major role inbreaking elements of interaction into logical structures and in the process makes it analytical. Hereagain the sequence should not be missed. Such interactions can be extended to preclude a myriadof activities related to business processes. The striking feature of any such interaction is theelement of managerial curiosity on which let me write a few lines.The questioning attitude of the manager starts with the element of curiosity that rocks his mind.Unless there is deep routed curious mind inside him, which had been nurtured consciously overyears of service as a practicing manager, every observation and thereafter inference drawn from itis bound to be myopic. Most managers fail to get to the “Big Picture” because they loose out onthis habit of curiosity not having nurtured it from infancy and not having applied it judiciously attimes of crisis or even otherwise. Managerial curiosity almost like scientific curiosity is whatdrives the engine of “change” in organizational activities.The next important thing that comes to my mind is the concept of “managerial planning” which isquite different from what we normally do in our everyday work life.
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