Success of Khan Academy:Management Lesson Learnt

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Albert Einstein

Millions of people come out of college every year around the world,still we could only find a few ideas that make an impact in the whole world. And Khan Academy(http://www.khanacademy.org/) is one of those few ideas.Most of you have heard about the MIT graduate and Harvard MBA Salman Khan who can imagine the potential of his tutoring videos in the world of education. Here lets have a look at the CNN 60 minutes covering Khan Academy.

Starting from a few maths videos for his cousins to enriching 3200 plus videos on different subjects , different sub-levels within each subject based on difficulty levels, 3.5 million unique users, 86.6 million lessons taught and 100 million exercise done: How Mr. Khan has accomplished this is really an interesting case study .Here is my management lessons learnt from Khan Academy.

How this concept really works? In a traditional class room teaching, everyone is taught at the same speed.If one student could not cope up with a subject,the whole class can not wait for him.Gradually the student who could not understand the fundamental of a subject fully,he will start creating a wall between the subject and himself/herself.Here comes Khan Academy into the picture.It uploaded the videos of different subjects on Youtube.com for the students to learn.If one student gets stuck into a problem,he can rewind the video many times he wants.This will help the student to understand the subject till he satisfied.Its different from traditional classroom teaching in the sense that a student will not learn 80% or 60% of a concept,but 100% before going for the next lesson.

Like any organization,Khan Academy has a vision and a mission statement. With mission statement "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere",it is constantly working to provide a better online platform and quality lessons to cater more and more people by diversifying its teaching subjects, starting from basic maths to micro/macro economics,partnering with universities,researchers,academicians,subject experts,targeting more schools to provide students a platform for self study.

Khan Academy is an innovative model if organizational structure is concerned.It has more employees working on the content of the lessons and on the platform that delivers the lessons than strategy team or planning team.According to Mr. Khan, organization should always focus on its core competence first.For Khan Academy,content and platform are their USP and they are striving to make these two things better and better to its intended recipients.

Theory Y states that management assumes employees may be ambitious and self-motivated and exercise self-control. It is believed that employees enjoy their mental and physical work duties in a job.How Khan academy is ensuring quality work in its project?Khan Academy is not for profit and hence it cannot pay millions of dollar for salaries.Then How?Mr. Khan says that he recruited people who wanted to work for Khan academy,for higher social returns instead of higher economic returns.Such people,though getting less salary than their previous employers,are more self motivated and more ambitious to perform than others;they become the most productive employees.For them working for betterment of society is more rewarding and stimulating than number-crunching & high paying jobs in a top Investment Bank.Till now Khan is able to attract lots of talented people starting from Google's no 1 employee to Yahoo,Bing employees.

How this non-for-profit model works?What about scalability?According to Khan,most of the trillions dollars spent on education sector are non-for profit.Khan Academy is able to attract a high number of Philanthropist and constantly attracting donations.Google also provided $2 million to support the creation of more courses, to allow for translation of the Khan Academy's content, and to allow for the hiring of additional staff.Mr. Khan's idea also gets a lot of attraction from the media.Even Bill gates has endorsed to his learning resources.Till now the whole project is funded by donation.

From the strategic point of view,Khan Academy is trying to take the virtual classroom idea to a traditional class room.It is working with Los Altos School district to provide the lessons in classrooms where students can self learn and also from peers.Assignments are provided in http://www.khanacademy.org/ where students can practise as much as he/she wants and accordingly reports are generated for individual students.By looking into the report,teachers can help a student in his/her weak areas.The same model can be expanded to every corner of the world.Here is the video of how peer tutoring works in Khan Academy model.

According to Mr. Khan,the Khan Academy model is open ended.It can reach to students of remote Africa in the same way it can reach to a US student.With the help of NGOs,the lessons can be distributed offline or through DVDs.It can help a private student like it helps a school student.It can help a soldier in Burmese camp like it helps a monk in Tibetian monastery. The boundary is unlimited.

It is said learning is a never ending process.And Khan Academy is trying to target every individual who cherish to be educated and enlightened.No doubt,TIME magazine is right,when it recognizes Mr. Khan as "Time 100 Most Influential People for 2012".

Learnings From Tower Building Exercise

FIRST CLASS

In our 1st class of Principles of Organization & Management by Professor Dr. T. Prasad, we are taught about the idea of earn while you learn. It is really thought provoking that a student in a typical B-School spends around Rs. 2000 to Rs. 4000 per day (including spending on the tuition fees) for 2 years of their education. On a country of 1.20 billion people, where 30 percent of population are under 25 years of age, it means a huge amount of non-productivity in terms of revenue generation.

This can be changed only when a student earns the expenses of his education during his education period. Lots of start-ups like Facebook, Google etc are incubated in college Labs. And with the advancement of Technologies, it becomes easier for students to participate in money making process during college. Many companies provide compensation for promotion of their brands through Twitter and blogs. Students can also participate in live projects in colleges with the partnerships of companies who are more than ready to invest in a good idea. Every B-School has an entrepreneurship cell which helps students to start their own company. In NITIE, students can learn the skills of selling by direct selling of NGO goods during Maha Mandi event. Hamara Dhanda, another initiative of NITIE and brainchild of Prof. Dr T. Prasad helps students to make their ideas into reality by helping them through the early phases of conception.

SECOND CLASS:

In our 2nd class of Principles of Organization & Management by Professor Dr. T. Prasad, we are assigned a tower building activity by using uniform wooden cubes with constraints that participant can use only ODD hand and will be blind-folded. What seems first a kind of mere team building event eventually becomes a source of management gyans, an arena to apply organizational principles, a fun learning experience and simultaneous discussion on the intricacies of running a business.

Here are my intakes from the tower building activity:

To work on a business idea, one needs a prior market research. Here in tower building activity, participants have access to historical data of Class PGDIM-18 batch where they able to build a tower up-to height of 17 cubes. Based on the previous findings, participants set an attainable goal of 17 which they able to succeed. In present competitive environment, every organization requires to re-analyze their goal through SMARTER way.

S-Specific: Goal of an organization needs to be well defined and easily understandable.It constitute the mission and vision of the organization.A specific goal/mission energies its employee to work together to attain the common goal of the organization.

M-Measurable: A goal should be within the measurable parameters.Without measurement,it will be difficult to keep a track of progress as well as planning.A well defined measurement scale will also help to find critical path of an activity and subsequent planning.

A-Achievable: The goal must be well achievable under the given circumstances.Sometimes it is difficult to set a large goal.In that case ,organization needs to set up small sub goals and based on the capabilities,new goal can be defined. An unachievable goal will lead to a capital-starved and debt-ridden organization. Here we can take the case of Kingfisher airline.It established itself as premium class airliner.However they have set a goal to establish themselves as premier class as well as low cost carrier at the same time.Acquisition of Air Deccan results in mismatch between two brands and finally grounding of its flight in many of the routes and financial crunch of Kingfisher airline.

R-Relevant: A relevant goal is always must ,specially for start-ups.An organization always first needs to exploit its core-competence.Google at the time of inception,put its goal to be a better search engine.Only after it attained its goal,it starts venturing into other services like social media(orkut/google plus),video sharing(you tube) etc.

T-Time Bound: A project without a deadline makes everything complicated.For instance,Haldia Petrochemical Plant in West Bengal is still loss making because of delay in completion of its plant commissioning by 2 years which leads to interest burden of Rs.600-700 crores per year and inflationary cost escalation to the tune of 10% per year of the original project cost.

E-Evaluate and R-Reevaluate: The last stage of SMARTER goal is to constantly evaluate the progress of organization goals and objectives and re-evaluate/re-do goals according to the changing market environment.

Now putting the SMARTER goals strategy to tower building activities,it is seen that participants have specific goal i.e. construction of tower , a measurable goal along with milestones like changing partners after construction of every 5 cubes height,an attainable goal of 17 cubes according to historic data available to them and re-evaluate to 19 cubes height after attaining the goal of 17 cubes height.

Some of the observations noticed during the tower building activities in the class room resembles to real life instances of the corporate world.

The team of 3 people can be categorized in three categories: Labourer/worker who is building the cubes tower,Middle Management who is instructing the labourer to work according to the goal and Top Management who is setting up the goal and giving inputs from time to time.

It is seen during the activity in the class that labourer(who is building the cube tower) was constantly complaining about the stiff goal and middle management is trying to placate him with water/cold drinks.In the real world,specially in manufacturing sector,labour force plays a vital role in construction and maintenance activities.Management needs to make sure that benefits like minimum wages,compensation for extended work hours,adequate safety measures and proper medical facilities are provided to them.Mismanagement of labour force leads to month long strike in Manesar Plant of Maruti Suzuki and resulted in huge backlog of new Swift orders.In my previous organization, M/s BCPL, a Petrochemical Plant Project, works stopped due to non-payment of minimum wages. As per the central government notification, high skilled worker, skilled worker, semi skilled worker and unskilled worker would draw a daily wage of Rs 259, Rs 220, Rs 182 and Rs 156 respectively .Only after my previous organization management agreed to pay the minimum wages,works resumed. The tower building exercise depicts the same. ( http://www.assamtribune.com/scripts/detailsnew.asp?id=jan0811/state06 )

When the builder was asked to use only ODD hand to build the tower and was blind folded him,it was middle management who helped him to build the tower.Similarly in real world,it is the duty of management is not only to set a goal,but creating a environment ,building confidence among employees to reach the goal. As Professor points out “great managers are masters of PYGMALION”( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect).They require to emphasis their expectation on their employees and show confidence on them.

Considering the non-participant students as customers/consumers who are asking to put more no of cubes,in a competitive market,consumers always asks for more.It created a pressure on the organization to perform better otherwise consumer will switch to a competitor’s brand.

While making the tower,participants face many problems like uneven cubes,effect of breeze at greater height,fatigue among the participants.As an organization expands its business,it is expected to face many obstacles.Proper HR policy,Recruitment policy needs to be adopted as the expansion is in progress.Phase by phase decentralization with implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning(ERP) leads to efficiency.Manager with conceptual skills are great use as individuals who have strong conceptual skills typically have excellent cognitive abilities to think creatively and solve problems.

The Tower Building activity helps the students to set a goal and work on to achieve the goal. Needless to say, NITIE PGDIM-19 B-section batch overcomes all the hurdles to build a record breaking tower of height 19 cubes in NITIE history.

Summary & Learning: As per the above discussion, I could related some of the HR issues of my previous organization like labour problems etc.

When I along with some of my friends went to start a coaching institute,we face some problems which could not be foreseen at the time of planning.Only at the time of operation,these problems could pop up into the environment like it is seen in Tower Building exercise(e.g. uneven cubes etc). According to me,only experience can help to foresee the problems beforehand and hence we need to plan/setting goal incorporating some unknown risk factors of operating environment.

The most important lesson learnt from the exercise is that opportunity should be exploited as and when it comes.The three participants grabbed the opportunity while rest of the class did not.The same with starting up a company. No body know you could be the next billionaire if you grab the opportunity.