Lalu Prasad Yadav's management concepts

Lalu Prasad Yadav in his tenure as Railway Minister, has turned loss-making Indian Railways into a flourishing profit-earning behemoth, with his simple management strategies.

He has been recognized as a rare management guru and has also given lectures at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; the Harvard Business School, and Wharton on how he turned the ailing public sector Railways into a successful organization.

Below are some of his simple but valuable strategies / principles / work formulas.

• Be a doer not an expert. Everyone can't be an expert and one doesn't essentially need to be an expert to achieve success. In fact, there is no dearth of experts. One just needs to put in hard work to bring a positive change.
  

• Be open. No matter how important a position one holds, one must always be open to new suggestions. The best form of advice may come from the person working at the lowest stratum of a company.

• Always acknowledge. Money is an incentive, no doubt but the biggest form of reward for any worker happens to be acknowledgment. Timely appreciation can go a long way in inspiring someone to do better than the best.

• Be a good manager. One must possess the tact to choose the right people for the right project. Someone who fails miserably at understanding a computer programme may show amazing skills at resolving a complicated puzzle of accounting. A good manager knows who is good at what.

• Trust your team. One must always place one's faith in the team one heads. The policy of standing by the people and trusting their ideas is an infallible management funda.

• No risk, no gain. A good manager is the person who is not scared of taking risks. Any business necessarily entails taking risks. And one who is brave enough to take a chance always succeeds in the ultimate round.

• Believe in practice, not theory. One should not get too bogged down by technicalities of management theories. The best management lesson can be learnt through trial and error. Books can provide a guideline only, they can never be the doer's functional steps.

• Have common sense. In times of crisis, one must fall back on one's common sense. Relate a business problem to a personal one and ask yourself how you would have solved it in your personal capacity. Use your common sense and a solution is sure to follow.

Source:http://specials.rediff.com/money/2008/oct/08sld1.htm