Three Monks and The Management Lessons!!!

Let's Analyze...

The movie is based on the Chinese proverb - "One monk will shoulder two buckets of water, two monks will share the load, but add a third and no one will want to fetch water".  The plot of the movie involved the problem of fetching water by three monks . The movie illustrates the process of evolving the best possible method to do this work and learning organization management lessons midway .

Following are the management lessons learnt :-

1. Teamwork does enhances the efficiency in the working of task  .

2.  Disputes tend to arise when there are more than one person involved .

3. Scientific and objectives measurements and instruments should be used to resolve the conflict .

4. The most efficient method to solve a problem evolves over a period of time .

5. Teamwork and team interest should take precedence over the personal interest .

6. Experiences in crisis management comes handy to come up with new innovative methods to solve  a problems .

7 Attitude of each team member determines the fate of the task  and decides for the success rate .

8. Synergistic roles :   Individual sums become bigger than what was there individually .

   

Some of the other takeaways from the story are:

1) Sharing of Responsibility:

This story teaches a gentle, humorous lesson about responsibility. Three monks allow personal pride to interfere with the performance of daily tasks, each believing that the other two should be the ones to go downhill to fetch water. This points to general human psyche of trying to avoid work and behave like a superior with others. In the story all 3 monks are completely capable of fetching the water from downhill and would have done so in absence of others. Hence the important lesson here is that at our workplace we are driven more so by not our capabilities and potential rather than on our pride and prejudice against a certain type of work. Hence while delegating responsibility among employees  the preferences and choice of an individual must be kept in mind along with his potential.

2) Bureaucracy:

                                                                           

This story  also criticises bureaucracy that are extremely inefficient and ineffective. In any organization eliminating bureaucracy completely is not possible but it should be designed to be minimalistic and efficient. In many organization especially government owned so many people are hired but nobody does any job because everyone wanted somebody else to do the job, just like the way those three monks expecting others to get the water.

3) Continuous Innovation and Drastic Innovation:

Harry Lime:" In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

The story also depicts how a tragedy or crisis situation can be beneficial for the organization. As the number of monks grew from 1 to 2 and then 3 all of them were trying to pass on the job to other rather than trying to find a way out through which the job can be easily done. It was only after the temple caught fire that they realized the need to work together and find a faster way of getting the water up to the temple. This is when they thought of implementing a pulley system otherwise they might have continued with the traditional system of fetching the water by walking down to the river forever. 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 and hence shutting down of operations for an organization. Successful Organizations today are those which are continuously hunting for internal and external developme