Managerial Approach to a Rubik's Cube

                    What is the first thought you get when I talk of solving a Rubik's cube? Arranging the cube with six different colours on all its six faces, am I right?

                     On a fine Monday morning, Dr. Prasad walked into the class carrying his bag full of toys (read management lessons). It is an irony that we are not surprised any more to find a surprising task in our Principles of Organization Management class. And so our day started when Dr. Prasad took out 27 small cubes comprising of 9 different colours. The immediate thought that struck everyone was we had to make a Rubik's cube, similar to the first statement I started writing this blog with.
We reached to a judgement just too quickly. The task was to arrange the cubes in such a manner that no face should have two same colours.

                    At first everyone became complacent and thought that the task wasn't tough. But only when one-two people tried their hands at it, they realized that they wren'e organized. Dr. Mandi then explained the algorithm to achieve the given task. Once understood, the algorithm was so simple that we wondered how it didn't strike any of us.

                   1)  The basic lesson learnt was the importance of organization. Half of our problems could be easily solved by proper organization of thoughts, manpower and material.

                    2) The second take-away was that things lie in simplicity. The more one over-complicates things, the tougher the task becomes.

                    3) Unity of command - When everybody was trying to suggest their approach, it resulted in a chaos. But when two people were selected at random and one of them was made the task-completer and the other giving suggestions, the process became smooth.

Following is the video of the task carried out by two volunteers. It was indeed a learning experience for all of us.

                   

                    Happy learning and happy blogging !