Science as the Prominent Segments in Human Life - Assignment Example

Introduction: Science and technology is nowadays considered to be one of the prominent segments in every aspect of human life because of the revolutionary contributions it has provided to the humans. It has reduced our efforts in many areas and contributed immensely to the development of human culture on earth. It has converted nights into days by the invention of electricity and electric bulbs. It has made the human generation capable of extending their hands to even outer space by the invention of rocket and satellite technologies. Most of the severe diseases which were non curable in former times were made curable with the invention of new medicines and treatments. It is difficult to think about an area in human life for which science and technology has not contributed to assist or improve. But it is essential to moderate the importance of Science in many areas of human life, if considering that sometimes, experience dominates over Science. For instance, Business is an area where experience plays a vital role rather than science in determining the success, even if Education within this area is giving a great importance to theorisation of concepts in Business. Importance of Science in Business: Business science is mostly taught in academic subjects. Master of Business Administration (MBA) is accepted as the world wide course which dealt with the essentials of business science. It deals with mainly the essential theoretical knowledge required for starting and maintaining a business successfully. It always provides general ideas which quiet often may not be enough in real business scenarios. The students are getting mainly the theoretical knowledge and understanding about the business through such courses. But the application part and skills development can be accomplished only through practical experiences. Most of the individuals, irrespective of the workers, clients or customers may come from different socio-economic and political standards and hence the knowledge about different communities, societies, political systems, ethnic groups, environment, etc are essential for a new entrepreneur. The business science may not give many ideas about such things to a student. For example, Dubai, however the difficulties it is currently facing, is a place where lot of foreigners are working together under one roof. An MBA degree holder graduated from India or China may not feel comfortable if he happens to work in Dubai initially. He needs to analyze the Arab work culture, Arab political and employment system, the climatic conditions and also the multi country work force well before implementing his strategies, and it is important to say that no academic knowledge or science will help him in such circumstances. He has to develop his own strategies after studying all the parameters to become a success in a multi cultural environment especially under the globalization and liberalization scenario. In other words, from the beginning of the entrepreneur’s business life, experience through a good analysis of the Business and the Socio-Political environment seems to be the only reliable quality needed, rather than any other Scientifical theory. Importance of Experience in Business: Business is a vast area where lot of unexpected things may happen every day. Even a small business consist of different segments like manufacturing, marketing, purchasing, planning, quality, technical, accounts, HR, administration, etc and hence challenges arises in each segment will affect the business. Moreover, in a rapidly changing market new challenges may occur every day which may not be dealt in the MBA classes which was studied by the entrepreneur. For example, the current global financial crisis came as a surprise to many experienced economists. Most of the economic experts failed to predict such a global recession and hence the business community failed to take precautionary measures to tackle the crisis. Most of the young entrepreneurs who have just started their business were struggled to handle the situation because of their inexperience. I know a young MBA degree holder who has started a petrol filling station before the recession begins. During the initial stages he was successful in running the business smoothly. Even some of the other petrol filling stations near this one also suffered business loss because of the aggressive marketing strategies implemented by this fellow. He has stored lot of petrol when the price of the crude oil started to approach $ 150/ barrel. He thought that the price may go even higher. He has not sold out his stock even when the prices started to dip thinking that the current dip may not last long. Finally he forced to sell out all his stock when the prices of crude oil begin to collapse drastically and suffered a major loss in his business. On the other hand the other experienced petrol business people around his filling station have escaped from much damage since they have sold out all the stock when the prices started to dip. The above example clearly suggests the importance of experience in business over academic qualifications or Science. The same entrepreneur will never act the same way in the future, if the same scenario occurs again because of his experience, because we learn from our mistakes. Theoretical knowledge arises only through practical experiences. Theories are formulated only after testing it with so many experiments or experiences. The existing business theories are good enough if the real world crisis occurs, exactly the same way as that described in the text book. “Knowledge is essential, but knowledge alone certainly isn’t enough. You must be able to act on your knowledge. You must put it to work because doing is how you learn and how you ultimately prove yourself “(Trump, n.d) In some instances, the entrepreneur needs to be innovative in dealing with some kinds of situations. Text book knowledge may not be enough in such cases. One of my friends who is working in Dubai as a production manager in a printing unit has told me one of his interesting experiences in dealing with workers there. The main printer in his printing unit was egocentric and he assumed that all the difficult works coming to that unit could be done by him alone. He thought that others are not skilled enough to undertake difficult jobs. It was difficult for my manager friend to manage this fellow because of his dominance in the printing unit. The management of the company has also allowed his dominance because of his utility and they were hesitated to take any actions against him. My friend was a smart manager and he had immense experience in dealing with such workers. He has devised a strategy to tackle this worker. Once this manager has approached this worker with a complicated work and this worker has raised some silly excuses to avoid that work. He though that the manger will request him further. But the manger has other ideas. He has selected one of the smart helper and he guided that worker to finish the complicated work in a successful manner. The manager has proved that even a helper can do that difficult job if he is guided properly. The ego centric printer never again created any problems for the manger. This is a perfect illustration where the use of a personally defined strategy has shown to be successful for workforce management purposes. Indeed, in the above example the manager has successfully managed the issue without using any force or sacrificing his dignity or authority. It is difficult to imagine such strategies being taught in a classroom if considering that no academic qualifications or science may be helpful for managers in tackling such situations. Only the experience and common sense will prevail in such situations. “The big idea is people making decisions about the world with large amounts of uncertainty. And the second big idea has to do with making experiments." (Rosenberg, 2001) In a volatile market uncertainty has higher share than anything else. It is these uncertainties decide the success or failure of a business. Experienced entrepreneurs always anticipate unexpected things in business and will be well prepared to face any such crisis. On the other hand fresh entrepreneurs may not be much concerned with the unexpected calamities and hence often fell into deep troubles. Eric Davis, vice president of Arxan Technologies (developer of advanced software security), brings a different set of attributes to his company. He earned a finance degree before going to law school. Both have been major assets. “Going to business school as an undergrad is what gave me the (entrepreneurial) bug,” he says. “And so much of starting a business is legal in nature. With that legal background, you’re not afraid.” In representing many small businesses during four years of practice, “I got to see a lot of things that went wrong.” While acknowledging the benefits of experience – “the more practice rounds you can have before the stakes are too high the better” – Davis says active involvement in all phases of the company is a strong teacher. (Schuman, 2003) Therefore, it is important to underline that an entrepreneur must have experience in all the segments of a business in order to manage his business efficiently. An entrepreneur who has taken marketing as special topic during his MBA studies must have sound knowledge in other areas as well in order to control the business. Indeed, Marketing itself can be considered as a science, or in other words, the science of selling but the ability to co-relate knowledges learnt from many different areas is not however a science. The information obtained from other areas must be interpreted properly in order to convert ordinary decisions into meaningful ones. The vision of the entrepreneur determines the success of his mission. He cannot function efficiently if he lacks centralized control over all the areas of the business. Posting some expert managers on different divisions alone may not help him to control his business properly. He is the person who has to take the ultimate decisions when the managers were confused to tackle certain problems and hence he should always participate or involve in all the entities of his business. Tim Andren once said “The best businesses know the importance of experience. Its part of their daily mantra. They hire the top sales people and marketing agencies that fully understand this concept.” (Andren, 2009) While hiring people or seeking help from other agencies, most of the companies will go for experienced people or agencies. Academic concepts about business and real business world experiences will be different in most of the cases and hence the fresh employment seekers need vigorous training before appointing them in critical positions. A sales manager has once explained me the strategies he has adopted in capturing a big business project. After evaluating the requirement by the client regarding the project the sales manager has realized that the project is a much larger one and the customer has approached him with only a portion of it. He has enquired about the full project in detail and the client though reluctant at first, finally explained the full project. The sales manager has convinced the client that it is better to do the entire project under one roof; otherwise there will be problems at the final stage. He has explained everything to the client and finally the client allotted the entire project to this sales manager after realizing the possible future bugs in the project if it was done separately at different locations. In the above example, the sales person was smart enough to make use of his personal experience as a sales manager to analyze and predict the potential problems that could occur in a later time. Only the experience has helped him in reading the project correctly. It is difficult to anticipate that a fresh candidate may analyze the project the same way as it has been done by the experienced sales man. Alok Mitttal, in his article The MBA entrepreneur, has written that from a purely analytical capability standpoint, based on the people he has met over the years, he found that young MBAs are just as good as the older people. However, freshers sometime lack real-world experience, which is crucial for success (Mittal, 2008). Nobody doubts about the ability of fresh candidates; but in order to fine tune their abilities experience plays a vital role. Just like in all other segments of life, experience plays a vital role in business as well. A fresh candidate in a business world is just like a new born baby in an environment he is actually not totally aware of. This baby has to go through innumerable real life situations before he becomes self sufficient. Kids in their early ages may meet many accidents because of their lack of maturity and awareness. For example, a kid may be attracted towards a burning candle. He will never approach the same candle once he suffers burn or experience the hotness of the candle. He may become aware that though burning candle provides light, it has some negative aspects as well. Same way a fresh entrepreneur may approach the business with the mindset of a kid. When he gets bad experiences, he will learn from all such things and hence will take precautionary measures to avoid such things in future. On the other hand the experienced entrepreneur may forecast such things in advance and will take all the necessary steps to avoid such things from happening. “And so the most important point about a start-up is: no matter how great the idea and no matter how much money you can raise, it is the quality of execution that can make or break you. Entrepreneurship goes beyond the idea, and that is why I keep highlighting the importance of experience” (Mittal, 2008) Entrepreneurship has so many dimensions apart from mere business. An entrepreneur must foresee environmental, social, cultural and political issues well in advance apart from business activities. A mere business idea alone may not make a person good entrepreneur. He has to consider so many other things well in advance to sustain his business. Even the business giant Coca cola has reportedly suffered a major setback when they forced to close down their bottling plant in one of the Indian states Kerala. They have exploited the ground water resources of Kerala immensely so that the people around the bottling plant suffered major drinking water shortage. They have gathered and started agitations against the plant and finally they forced to pack up. They failed to analyze the business prospects or the socio-economic environment of Kerala correctly even though they were one of the biggest established MNCs in the world. The role of science in business So far we have discussed the importance of common sense and experience over science in doing business. But nobody can completely write off science and its role in business. The advanced technological developments have eased so many difficult components of business. For example, we can think of the fact that how a computer assisted accounts package reduced the calculations and book works of the accounting of a company. The role of internet and e-mail, nobody can deny in business today. The knowledge about science and scientific concepts will help an entrepreneur to take appropriate decisions at the right time. For an entrepreneur, the knowledge about economic science will always helpful in formulating his strategies. He can work on his business strategies based on the scientific evidences. A share business person will never invest in the shares of a potentially volatile company. Economic science will help him in identifying the possible risk factors in investing in that company. Modern scientific management theories will help an entrepreneur to utilize his resources effectively for getting maximum profit. As per the changing trends of the market and customers, an entrepreneur needs to change his strategies as well. Nowadays relationship building is the core of marketing strategies as per the modern scientific methods of organizational theories. The old concept of capturing a business at any cost has been given way for relationship building with the customer as per the modern trends. The identification of these excellent marketing strategies is the contribution of organizational science. Conclusions: Finally, we can easily state that Science has largely influenced many areas of human life positively, giving the Human kind the opportunity to control its environment, and improving his own life conditions, but it has unfortunately fewer roles in the making of a businessperson. This discussion has rather shown that common sense and experience has larger importance in the making of a successful entrepreneur which somehow discredits Academic knowledge. Indeed, we have seen that Academic knowledge may not help much while facing real challenges in business life. On the contrary, Academics are rather helpful in giving some ideas and theories that will help the future Entrepreneur to get a better understanding of the environment he will have to face. He is then not taught how to be a successful entrepreneur, but he will be given the key to be as successful as he can be. The key of his success is potentially his aptitude to get the most from a collective and personal experience mixed in a combination of many other practical factors. Nevertheless, Business science does not have to be neglected completely since it is capable of predicting future trends in business. Moreover business science can help an entrepreneur to adopt the right strategies at the right time in an extremely unstable market conditions. Read More