Some­how, I tend go miss­ing for a while and then fin­ish edit­ing posts in batches xD

[Deisel-turbo]

In many ways, Moshi­dora could be seen as a fic­tion­al­ized, dra­ma­tized man­age­ment text­book that started off with pure tech­ni­cal­ity and even­tu­ally brought audi­ence sym­pa­thy to the screen. Many of its char­ac­ters were never given proper depth, and for much of the series it felt more like an aca­d­e­mic case study than a story. It’s hardly sur­pris­ing (in fact I expected it), as the name dic­tates that the entire theme was cen­tered around a sin­gle book. But just as its own Mar­ket­ing went, it accom­plished this goal won­der­fully. My only regret is that I didn’t have the chance to watch it years ago— because man­age­ment skills often come into play way before you expect it.

Ducker’s Man­age­ment is def­i­nitely not just for ‘busi­ness­men in suits’…

Unfor­tu­nately, even most man­agers are not so enlight­ened. In most work­places, you’re expected to work because it’s your job, it’s what you’ve been told to do, and that you’re paid to do it. This old-style approach was firmly embed­ded into soci­ety by Tay­lorism, which believes that peo­ple will be sat­is­fied as long as they receive proper com­pen­sa­tion. Thus, most moti­va­tional tools in our cul­ture all revolve around com­ple­tion incen­tives, rather than build­ing trust and fos­ter­ing the exchange of ideas dur­ing the process. Profit » team­build­ing, one could say.

Most orga­ni­za­tions don’t prac­tice fair process… (They) assume peo­ple focus solely on out­comes… Out­comes mat­ter, but no more than the fair­ness of the processes that pro­duce them. — Har­vard Busi­ness Review

That’s for orga­ni­za­tion plan­ning, not team plan­ning — don’t mix.

So instead of rely­ing pri­mar­ily on win­ning and reach­ing the cham­pi­onships as the incen­tive, like most teams would, Minami (and her book) takes a much bet­ter approach: what are you hop­ing to find in base­ball? It’s not merely a ques­tion for man­agers either. In fact, any­one who ever took part in an extracur­ric­u­lar or hob­by­ist project should have thought of it— the work being done is often gen­uine, but unlike a real occu­pa­tion one isn’t get­ting paid for it. So… how does one keep them­selves and oth­ers moti­vated on every­thing from trans­la­tion groups to (anime) club pre­sen­ta­tions to team blog­ging? What about any other group activ­ity where not every­one might agree?

The best teach­ers, coaches, and lead­ers in gen­eral are those who make the process enjoyable~

Fair Process isn’t merely a man­age­r­ial con­cept, it’s a group decision-making con­cept. It focuses upon the psy­chol­ogy that peo­ple will stay moti­vated and com­mit­ted to teams they trust and respect, striv­ing to main­tain moti­va­tion and ini­tia­tive through its three prin­ci­ples:

Engage­ment: To involve indi­vid­u­als in the deci­sions that affect them, seek­ing their opin­ions and reac­tions; as man­age­ment has to show respect to mem­bers’ inter­ests to receive respect for its own goals. This was cen­tral to Minami’s man­age­r­ial goals in Mar­ket­ing: it’s not just what the team needs, but what the team mem­bers want, and to find that out she has to con­verse with them as indi­vid­u­als (rather than just a ‘team mem­ber’ resource) by engag­ing them individually.

Expla­na­tion: Every­one involved and affected should under­stand why final deci­sions were made as they are. Minami real­izes early that a key role on any team is Trans­la­tion, mak­ing sure all details (espe­cially dis­agree­able ones like pulling a pitcher) are prop­erly explained to all par­ties so no mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions arise. It’s also cen­tral to Inno­va­tion, as only proper expla­na­tions will allow fresh ideas obtained through Engage­ment, such as the captain’s rad­i­cal “no bunt no ball” strat­egy, to become accepted— the team had no faith in it, but they trusted the cap­tain enough to try for the sake of the team.

Trans­la­tion is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant in any tech­ni­cal project — be it the pro­gram­mer or editor.

Expec­ta­tion Clar­ity: Once a deci­sion is made, all rules and expec­ta­tions must be clearly made to every­one at start; in fact, under­stand­ing of the rules is more impor­tant than the rules them­selves, as it allows mem­bers to focus on their tasks by min­i­miz­ing unnec­es­sary wor­ries and favoritism. Be it boost­ing the lineup mem­bers’ sense of respon­si­bil­ity after Opti­miza­tion or estab­lish­ing indi­vid­ual roles in Tiered Man­age­ment, clar­i­fy­ing expec­ta­tions is arguably the great­est respon­si­bil­ity of leadership.

Yet despite her work in fol­low­ing the Fair Process, Minami com­pletely focused her­self on the com­ple­tion goal (win­ning the cham­pi­onship for Yuki) for most of Moshi­dora. It took her until the end of the series to truly appre­ci­ate and under­stand her work — for a team, the process of get­ting to the goal is as impor­tant if not more so than the goal itself.

Just as the process of learn­ing taught Minami some­thing even more valu­able than the con­cepts that pro­duced the result~

K-ON! doesn’t need it [Diesel-turbo] but maybe now Azu-nyan wouldn’t have to be all alone.

Post­note: Part of the rea­son I felt so strongly about the series is because I led stu­dent devel­op­ment teams on projects before. I was def­i­nitely *not* good in a man­age­r­ial sense, and watch­ing Moshi­dora left me a lot of regrets on all the things I could have done better.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 12th, 2011 at 19:16 and is filed under Analysis, Anime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.