Action...Fight...Wake up...

I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

• You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

• The first soap was made from the ashes of heroes, like the first monkey shot into space. Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing.

• Stop trying to control everything and just let go.

Time - Tic Tic Tic......

Time - it is the one thing that we are all running out of. It cannot be replaced. When it is spent, it is spent.

What, then, are you doing to ensure that you are maximizing the use of time?"

Understand that time will pass regardless of whether you spend it wisely or simply waste it.

You can make time your friend or it can be your worst enemy. Most people leave important tasks till the last possible moment then they are forced by self-imposed circumstance to rush everything. This is a lack of planning and responsibility , often borne from that other scourge called procrastination - the inability to begin.

Leaving things until the "eleventh hour" is where that horrible word "URGENT" comes from. Whenever you hear that word you can almost certainly be sure that somebody in the chain is trying to deflect the blame onto somebody else for their own slackness. You don't do that do you?

How many times have you heard people complain that they "haven't had time!"? What they really mean, and what they should be saying, is "I left it too late and ran out of time." Ever hear anybody say that? Uh-uh - that sounds too self-deprecating doesn't it? So they blame time itself.

Time does not care how you spend it. You can use it to create marvelous things in your life or you can waste it. All of us have only 168 hours per week. About a third of that is spent re-charging, that is, sleeping. That leaves 112 hours to use - more than enough to achieve anything you want.

I have a saying about sleep. "You can sleep all you want when you are dead." In the meantime, if you have something really important to do then get up an hour earlier in the morning. Conversely, if you are a "night person" you can stay awake for several hours in the evening to get things done.

The wise use of time is the mark of a successful person.

Plan your actions. Use time wisely - you are never going to get it back. The clock is always ticking. Tick. Tick. Tick...

Weekends have become the most productive days

A budding professional looks forward to the weekend as a welcome break from the stress and grind of their work life, choosing to spend time with family, catching up on personal errands, heading off to the malls and markets or just sleeping in. Limited time availability makes it difficult to manage this during the week.

However, some executives and entrepreneurs are using the same disadvantage of being pressed for time to out do their peers, boost their skill sets and enhance their careers. They make their week ends the most productive and future focused days of the week. ITM’s Executive Education Center offers programs tailor made for the week day busy professional.

Part time MBA programs have been around for decades and have proven very popular amongst working executives. Many management institutes in Mumbai, Delhi offer part time programs affiliated with the Mumbai University and DU. These programs are usually of three years duration, with a course schedule that sees students attending classes on weekday evenings after their work hours.

With ever increasing responsibility at work, the 9 to 5 workday is long one, making it nearly impossible for many executives to attend MBA classes every evening. What’s more, with the speed at which careers are moving, many feel that three years is too much time to invest in a much needed Masters qualifications.

Distance Education programs are a popular choice for executives who feel the need to add to their qualifications. However, many graduates have realized that employers give little value to these degrees, especially when there are candidates with full time MBA degrees waiting in line.

Empathizing with the lifestyle of today’s working professionals ITM realized that a faster but equally enriching and intensive Executive Masters program was the much sought after solution. Consequently, ITM Executive education Center started offering its students the choice of a weekend class schedule for its Executive Masters programs in 2003. Students could choose to attend classes on Saturdays and Sundays rather than during the week. This format proved so convenient that within a year all new batches were following the weekend format.

Today, ITM Executive Education center is one of the most popular choices for part time executive education in Mumbai. The numbers speak volumes for the success of the program, with over 2,000 students currently enrolled in weekend programs at its 11 centers spread across Mumbai and Navi Mumbai.

ITM wants to give working professionals a competitive advantage over their peers who do not have a Masters qualification, and want to do it in the fastest, most convenient and academically enriching way possible.

All efforts are concentrated towards enhancing the productivity of the schedule for working professionals. The entire infrastructure of ITM EEC is designed around the Weekend Education Programs and this is evidence to the thought put into meeting a very essential need – the need to save time.

Convenient travel from home or work is the perk:

Earlier they had just one campus in Mumbai and students lived far from it would have to travel for hours to attend their courses. But they realized that their sole purpose is time saving and that it was obligatory for them to be located closer to clients’ offices or homes. So they started looking at center locations that would be convenient. ITM Executive Center now has active centers in Sion, Matunga, Vile Parle, Dombivili, Chembur, Vashi and Kharghar, and they are still expanding. ITM has upcoming centers in Oshiwara, Thane and other locations in suburban Mumbai.

The Centers offers two programs – a 24 month Masters program in Business administration, which is for young professionals and a 16 month program, which is for experienced professionals. This distinction allows the faculties to design and deliver the right level of education to their students. Young executives who have below 3 years of work experience need a good grounding in business fundamentals and concepts. Older executive bring a wealth of experience into the classroom and require more advanced exploratory learning. Our facilities are capable of adapting the course content and subject coverage based on the age and experience of the batch.

Students believe that the programs offered are very rewarding and worth the time they spend on it.

ITM are amazed at how many new candidates come to them through the reference of their colleagues or friends who are studying with them. 60% of students come through the recommendation of a colleague. ITM EEC has been so successful with its weekend Maters Program that we have launched it in Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata, with similar responsiveness.

ITM EEC’s centers and classrooms are well equipped for modern teaching methods using LCD projectors and other A/V equipment. All students get top of the line Acer laptops along with their book kits. All this technology really comes to the forefront when students have group assignments and projects.

Career progression is our main objective but our students experience many more benefits. The professional and social networking possibility is a big bonus. Many students find their next jobs, business deals and even start new ventures while they’re enrolled with us. The big benefit is getting promotions and new jobs. Most of our students are able to move up of management positions in their organizations within a year of completing the program.

Weekends have become the most productive days of the week for so many working professionals who realize that they need to get qualified, get an edge and get hired.

Social Events shape management

These are long pending posts,

We conclude this historical review by showing you how social events shape and theorists write about and what practicing managers focus on. Although some management historians may quarrel with the following cause effect analysis, few would disagree that societal conditions are the primary driving forces behind the emergence of the different management.

What stimulated the classical approach?

The common thread in the ideas offered by individuals such as Taylor, the Gilbreths, Fayol, and Weber has increased efficiency. The world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was highly inefficient. Most organizational activities were unplanned and unorganized. Job responsibilities were vague and ambiguous. Managers, when they existed, had no clear notion of what they were supposed to do. There was a crying need for ideas that could bring order out of this chaos and improve productivity. And the standardized practices offered by the classicists were a means to increase productivity. Take the specific case of scientific management. At the turn of the twentieth century, the standard of living was low; wages were modest, and few workers owned their own homes. Production was highly labor intensive. It wasn’t unusual, for instance, for hundreds of people to be doing the same repetitive, back breaking job, hour after hour, day after day. So Taylor could justify spending six months or more studying one job and perfecting a standardized one best way to do it because the labor intensive procedures of the time had so many people performing the same task. And the efficiencies on the production floor could be passed on in lower prices for steel, thus expanding markets, creating more jobs, and making products such as stoves and refrigerators more accessible to working families. Similarly, Frank Gilbreth’s breakthroughs in improving the efficiency of bricklayers and standardizing those techniques meant lower costs for putting up buildings and, thus, more buildings being constructed. The cost of putting up factories and homes dropped significantly, so more factories could be built, and more people could own their own homes. The end result: The application of scientific management principles contributed to raising the standard of living of entire countries.

What stimulated the Human Resources Approach?

The human resources approach rally began to roll in the 1930s when two related forces were instrumental in fostering, this interest. First was a backlash to the overly mechanistic view of employees held by the classical view. Second was the Great Depression.

The classical view treated organizations and people as machines. Managers were the engineers who ensured that the inputs were available and that the machines were properly maintained. Any failure by the employee to generate the desired output was viewed as an engineering problem. It was time to redesign the job or grease the machine by offering the employee an incentive wage plan. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking created an alienated workforce. Human beings were not machines and did not necessarily respond positively to the cold and regimented work environment of the classicists’ perfectly designed organization. The human resources approach offered managers solutions for decreasing this alienation and for improving worker productivity.

The Great Depression swept the globe in the 1930s and dramatically increased the role of government in individual and business affairs. For instance, in the United States, Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal sought to restore confidence to a stricken nation. Between 1935 and 1938 alone, the Social Security Act was created to provide old age assistance: the National Labor Relations Act was passed to legitimize the rights of labor unions; the Fair Labor Standards Act introduced the guaranteed hourly wage; and the Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act established the first national unemployment protection. This New Deal climate increased the importance of the worker. Humanizing the workplace had become congruent with society’s concerns.

Human relations movement

Another within the human resources approach is important to management history for its unflinching commitment to making management practices more humane. Members of the human relations movement uniformly believed in the importance of employee satisfaction – a satisfied worker was believed to be a productive worker. For the most part, the people associated with this movement – Dale Carnegie, Abraham Maslow, and Douglas McGregor were individuals whose views were shaped more by their personal philosophies than by substantive research evidence.

Dale Carnegie is often overlooked by management scholars, but his ideas and teachings have had an enormous effect on management practice. His book How to Win Friends and Influence People was read by millions in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. In addition, during this same period, thousands of managers and aspiring managers attended his management speeches and seminars. What was the theme of Carnegie’s book and lectures? Essentially, he said that the way to succeed was to
(1) make others feel, important through a sincere appreciation of their efforts;
(2) make a good first impression;
(3) win people over to your way of thinking by letting others do the talking, being sympathetic and never telling a man he is wrong and
(4) change people by praising good traits and giving the offender the opportunity to save face.

Abraham Maslow, a humanistic psychologist, proposed a hierarchy of five needs: physiological,
safety,
social esteem and self actualization. In terms of motivation,
Maslow argued that each step in the hierarchy must be satisfied before the next level can be activated and that once a need was substantially satisfied,
it no longer motivated behavior.

Douglas McGregor is best known for his formulation of two sets of assumptions -
Theory X and Theory Y – about human nature.

Theory X presents an essentially negative view of people. It assumes that they have little ambition, dislike work, want to avoid responsibility and need to be closely supervised to work effectively.

On the other hand, Theory Y offers a positive view assuming that people can exercise self direction accept responsibility and consider work to be as natural as rest or play. McGregor believed that Theory Y assumptions best captured the true nature of workers and should guide management practice.

A story about McGregor effectively captures the essence of the human perspective. McGregor had taught for a dozen years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before he became president of Antioch College. After six years at Antioch, he seemed to recognize that his philosophy had failed to cope with the realities of organizational life.

He believed for example, that a leader could operate successfully as a kind of advisor to his organization though without being a boss. Unconsciously he hoped to duck the unpleasant necessity of making difficult decisions, of taking the responsibility for in course of action, among many uncertain alternatives, of making mistakes and taking the consequences. Good human relations would eliminate all discord and disagreement. He couldn’t have been more wrong. It took a couple of years for him to realize that a leader cannot avoid the exercise of authority any more than he can avoid responsibility for, what happens to his organizations.

The irony in McGregor’s case was that he went back to MIT and began preaching his humanistic doctrine again. And he continued to do so until his death. Like Maslow’s McGregor’s beliefs about human nature have had a strong following among management academics and practitioners.

What common thread linked the advocates of the human relations movement?
The thing that United human relations supporters, including Carnegie, Maslow, and McGregor, was an unshakable optimism about people’s capabilities. They believed strongly in their cause and were inflexible in their beliefs, even when faced with contradictory evidence. No amount of contrary experience or research evidence would alter their views. Despite this lack of objectivity, advocates of the human relations movement had a definite influence on management theory and practice.

Avoid getting distracted

To cut yourself off, get a pair of headphones that block out noise. Your colleagues will get the message that you do not wish to be disturbed(Somehow I need more oxygen then others, need more space for myself but people around u are always good lechers; they will suck your blood till death).

Diwali is the time for festivities. There always is a lot to do from planning parties to making time for shopping during lunch hours. Losing focus of work is inevitable. Here are some tips to avoid getting distracted by the Diwali festivities:

Everyone at the office either wants or is expected to contribute in some way or the other towards the festive preparations. At the same time, your boss won’t want your productivity to get affected. It’s best to schedule a time for those brainstorming sessions that involve decisions like theme of decorating the office, lunch menu for Diwali party etc. If everyone agrees to come in early for such meetings, it is easy to get this off your agenda and concentrate on work for the rest of the day.

If you are responsible for scoring any of the requirements for Diwali, don’t waste time going through Yellow Pages and looking for vendors. Use the Internet to find vendors, draft a common e-mail and shoot it off to them asking for quotations to be either emailed or faxed back. This way you can go through the quotations when you are free instead of answering or making phone calls in the midst of an assignment.

The first rule of time management and avoiding distractions – any work that can be handled by someone else should be delegated. Break up the task assigned to you for the Diwali run up into smaller steps. If any of these chores be handled by your secretary or colleagues request them to do so. This makes it easier to keep your work and Diwali schedule on track.

The one time when you aren’t likely to get frowns from the boss for focusing on Diwali preparations is when you use some time of your lunch hour. This could also be perfect for having impromptu, meetings on the subject. In fact, it could just brighten up your lunch hour and then have you in good spirits to focus on work.

There will always be a buzz about Diwali preparations around the office. It may be difficult not to get drawn into a conversation with colleagues in the next cubicle. The best way is to completely cut your self off – get a pair of headphones that block out noise. Your colleagues will get the message that you do not wish to be disturbed and if they don’t, hang a “Do Not Disturb” sign on your chair.

Above all, one needs to have the right mental attitude – festivals are fun, but being a responsible adult means that you know how to draw the line between fun and work.

The above is one conservative thought. Office Diwali celebrations are brief with a Puja and may not require any executive time. There are people like Attendants and contract cleaning staff under the supervision of Administrative department or Union leaders in case of Factories. First of all in an office environment there will not be any noise because holidays for the festival are declared. So such gadgets like headphones may not be required. Even if somebody wears them with a good intention the boss can think that you are listening to Music during working hours.

Effective Time management is required on all working days. Enjoy festival holidays with family and forget the work at that time. Once back to office deliver your tasks. Keep aside the conservative advises and thoughts.

This is an experience i just had and believe me you really need to prioritize your work accordingly. Don' speak for the results let the results speak for you.....