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Monday, 25 June 2012

LE01 : Goal Settings


We have experienced significant difficulties in overcoming fear of uncertainties.  We have bounded ourselves in self-limiting boundaries and prevent ourselves from thinking out-of-box. Dr T. Prasad’s first session on principle of organization management provoked us to think beyond self comforting boundaries. He encouraged us to start with our own ventures ‘Hamara Dhandha’ where we can apply our management learning’s of next 2 years to grow it up to self sustainable level. Few students in our class made money by writing blogs in their area of interests.

Moreover he also raised question on our education system which gives more emphasis on theoretical knowledge rather than knowing practicality of the concepts.  Also, he showed us few toys which can be innovatively used to explain and derive basic mathematical formulas rather than traditional rote learning. Video of ‘Another brick on the wall’ by Pink Floyd best describes the above said situation. 

He showed us the video of ‘Maha-Mandi’, an initiative by Dr. T Prasad to make student have firsthand experience about how marketing and sales has been done in real world. I have gained few key learning’s through this video .
  1. Strategizing before approaching the customer plays a very pivotal role. Like, explaining the educational aspects of the toys to the parent as they are very concern about their children’s education. Giving chocolates to the children and inviting them to see our product.
  2. One should not get disheartened by initial failures. One should keep trying till he gets the success.

Latter we were introduced to term SMART goals. Goal setting plays a very vital role in growth of the organization or individual. It provides sense of direction and purpose.  These five key letter means:



Goal setting encourages participants to put in substantial effort. Also, because every member has defined expectations for their role. Importance of goals setting was explained through ‘Tower Building’ activity.
Team of 3 was divided into different hierarchy:
  • -       Top Management
  • -        Manager
  • -       Sub-ordinate















These levels are fundamental and basic hierarchy of any organization. I could co-relate this to my organizational structure of my previous employer. Each member has specific and defined roles and responsibilities.



There few take-aways from the above activity. These are:
  1. Goals can lead to more effort. Goals serve as an energizer; higher goals induce greater effort while low goals induce lesser effort. For example, most of the students were of opinion that tower of more than 15 cube can’t be build with sub-ordinate being blind-folded and using his odd hand. But they set the goal of 18 cubes which they achieved in the end with their determination.
  2. Persistence – Persistence is also their
  3. Goals can lead individuals to develop and change their behaviour. Initially, the sub-ordinate was of opinion that tower of more 10 cubes can’t be built looking at the difficulty level of the task. But later, he started believing in himself and with proper guidance from management they attained the milestone.
  4. The more employees are motivated, the more they are more interested in accepting goals.
  5. One's belief that he is able to achieve the goals plays a very important role in attainment of goals.


The session on Goal-setting suggests that it's an effective tool for making progress by ensuring that participants in a group with a common goal are clearly aware of what is expected from them.