The story of Three Monks

Good News. This blog is based on an award-winning Chinese classical cartoon. So there will be more story- telling and less “gyan” in this blog.

       There is a temple on a high mountain. Also there is a river at the foot of the mountain from where water has to be fetched. One day a monk came to the temple and he started to fetch water from the river regularly. After few days another monk came there. At first they had a disagreement regarding fetching water. Eventually both of them went and carried water together from the river. At first they had a dispute regarding the holding position as they measured according to their hand size. But then one of them used a scale and they put the bucket in the middle of the rod. The problem began when another monk came to the temple. All of them thought the other monks should go to fetch water. They were so stringent that one of the monks drank the water of the flower vase kept in front of the goddess. This continued for few days until emergency occurred. A rat ate the base of burning candlestick and fire broke out. The flame started to burn down the temple. So three of them ran and fetched the water altogether and extinguished the burning temple. They also found a new way to fetch the water by working altogether. 

To know the “New Way” you have to watch the video.This link is 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rolBiHfWokY

Now time for some Management Lessons:

·         Participative Management:

Three monks were unwillingly to fetch water though being thirsty. It points to general human psyche of avoiding work and behaves like superior with others. It also happens in our workplace that we are driven by the pride and prejudice of certain type of work rather than thinking about the importance of the work.

           As in my case working in a engineering consultancy company we have to deal with a lot of photocopies. After joining the company when my senior asked me to make a photocopy for some document, initially I was somewhat reluctant. But then I understood that it is also a part of the whole process and document checking can’t be done without so called “small work” of doing photocopy.

·         Drastic Innovation:

“You don't know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.”

The story also discusses about crisis situation and how innovation happens in disaster. It was only after the temple caught fire that they realized that they have to extinguish the fire altogether. They also got a new plan to fetch water. So it can be seen that sometimes crisis situation can be beneficial for organization mostly for the research and development section.

            One example comes to my mind in this context that few years back Nokia’s monopoly in Indian mobile handset market. At that time dual sim phones came to market. Initially Nokia was unwilling to launch a dual sim phone. Eventually its market shares gone down and finally it decided to launch dual sim phones. Though today it remains  as one of the major player in India’s handset market, the incident damaged Nokia’s market share.

             This proves “Necessity is the mother of innovation”. But such a situation is very dangerous in today’s competitive world since there is always a chance of your competitor developing a new technology which can lead to obsoleteness.

·         Design of Operations System :

Many times it happens that that the operational productivity is very less because they personnel are not sure about there goals. So the productivity can be increased by defining clear goals. Like

So from this video we come to know that

·         Participative management is important for organizations benefit as well for workers growth.

·         Company should engage itself with continuous innovation to keep itself up to date. Drastic innovation is good for future learning but shouldn’t be practised.

·         In a team work everybody should be clear about the bigger picture as well as their individual responsibility. This distribution of individual responsibility can be discussed by

“Division of Labour” which will be discussed in next blog.

Hope you liked it.

Any types of suggestions/criticism/comments are valuable.

Thanks for Reading.

Arnab Mukherjee

PGDIM-20

Roll No-042