Knowledge is Might

There are two instances that I would like to share here -

I was once called at a reputed hotel school in Western India to be a part of a panel to judge a culinary competition. I went there with high expectations, hoping to find some good talent, as this was a zonal level competition and participants were competing to qualify for national level. However it did not turn out to be such, and the presentations were very mediocre. I could see that the entire panel (which along with me consisted of a culinary trainer, a pastry Chef and an Executive Chef - all from reputed hotel brands from the industry) was disappointed to see the presentation of food and what majorly lacked among the participants was knowledge. The basic rules of culinary were not followed and participants did not know the standard recipes. What was presented was wrong, and the participants were trying to sell it under the name of innovation. In my address to the students at the end of the event, I took the liberty to express my disappointment and did mention that, innovation should be used to enhance the presentation of ones knowledge and not as a tool to hide the lack of it (knowledge)

The second instance was a recent one in one of the companies I was working for. We were working on a project, and were not really doing great on it.I was majorly getting stuck on receiving inputs from my managers working in operations, as they were all busy. This was one of those times when our financial numbers were not looking really great and we were advised to keep our costs low. Further while I was sitting in my office trying to figure out how to sort this project out, I received a call from the Personnel Manager asking me to hold on to the recruitment's for the month and push as many to the following month to keep payroll for the month under control. In a scenario like this, what left me wondering was what was keeping the operations managers busy. They were all surely not working on improving the business (that was not their prime job), but the fact was, that they were indeed busy.

I find both these instances inter related and personally feel that it is an outcome of lack of knowledge. The first instance with this reference is self explanatory. In the second one what I observed is managers are continuously busy in developing new systems to tackle every problem, without trying to understand what originally exists in the organization and how the same system can further be developed. It is important that as managers we remain patient and spend time in gaining knowledge of the existing technology or systems and then brain storm on further improving it (or if need arises, eliminating it and replacing it with a new one)

The interrelation I found here is, as students in management schools we do not train our selves in improving our knowledge, but concentrate on grades, which unfortunately as seen here doesn't serve us well as professionals. The worst part is that we get into a habit of going easy on knowledge even as professionals (concentrating more on work) while the fact as we all know is, at every stage of our career - Knowledge is Might.

In a nut shell what I feel is to be successful at what we are doing (whether it is a job or a business that we are running) and to do justice to what we are getting paid for - acquiring, upgrading and updating our knowledge is very important, for 'Knowledge is Might'