I recently came across an article titled Lessons from my grandmother on Hindu Business Line which talks about how a successful manager based in India learned the basic lessons in management just by watching his grandmother manage the house. A quick google search on "business lessons from grandma" and you will actually find a host of similar articles from around the world.

Unfortunately in today's world of real time communication, grandma is rarely ever given a chance to manage huge families as everyone likes to be independent. As a result the concept of joint families even in countries like India is slowly fading away.

The article also made me realise how much we undervalue the services of our mothers and traditional housewives, who give up many years of income to sustain our lives. In monetary terms it would cost a fortune to get the kind of services that our mothers give us.

The article is reproduced in brief below

It was early morning. My brother and I were enjoying the peace and the aroma of our first cup of coffee. We were reminiscing about our childhood and the happy times we had as part of a wonderful joint family in Madras, as it then was called. During summer vacations when outstation members also joined the family, we used to have more than 50 people living in the same house. Given my interest in writing about management practices, my brother told me that one of the best managers he had ever seen was our widowed grandmother and he went on to explain why .

Planning: It is an abiding mystery even today as to how she managed the meals for the household which had varying populations at different times of the day. It was also a time when the men felt no need to inform anyone if they would be home for a meal or not - they just expected to be fed whenever they put in an appearance! To complicate matters, there would be a rotating cast of those temporarily staying with us. We do not recall a single occasion when our grandmother did not have enough for everyone.

Budget and Cash Flow: As children those days, we had no clue about money and its power; very simply put, we had none and did not seem to be the worse for it. Managing the household must have been horrendously tough. What made it even more challenging was the blithe assumption by the earning members that our grandmother would somehow manage.

Resource Utilisation: She hated wasting anything and was a past master at extracting the most out of material resources and the best out of people. Her favourite weapons were stories of goodness and achievements from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. If all that did not work, she would shame us into doing what was needed.

Prioritisation: She had a wonderful capacity to dynamically prioritise things that needed to get done. She was like a juggler with a number of balls in the air but with the added twist that numbers would change suddenly and without notice. She managed everything calmly and rarely showed her irritation at the constant chopping and changing she had to do.

Dealing with crises: As a family we seemed to lurch from one minor crisis to another regularly; and some major ones from time to time – pretty much par for the course for most families, I guess. The problem here was that all these crises had to be handled in an environment where responsibilities seemed to devolve only on a couple of people but the rights to create the problems seemed to be all pervasive! Our grandmother would be sure to tell those who should have shouldered more responsibility in a nice way if they were adults and would frighten the daylights out of us children, if we were the culprits.

Read the rest of this piece at its orginal location here and do share your thoughts on this.