Sunday 19 August 2012

THE 3 MONKS - Management Learnings




 The subject has given me lots of surprising experiences . The activities which happens during the class gives us a practical example of the theories of management  we are supposed to know. Last class we saw a video, a short animated chines movie. I don’t know about others but I loved it. It was a nice break from the usual classes

Please go through the video once.Link given below :



ABOUT THE MOVIE

Three Monks is a Chinese animated feature film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. After the cultural and the fall of the political Gang of Four in 1976, the film was one of the first animations created as part of the rebirth period. It is also referred to as The Three Buddhist Priests.



PLOT

 

A young monk lives a simple life in a temple on top of a hill. He has one daily task of hauling two buckets of water up the hill. He tries to share the job with another monk, but the carry pole is only long enough for one bucket. The arrival of a third monk prompts everyone to expect that someone else will take on the chore. Consequently, no one fetches water though everybody is thirsty. 




At night, a rat comes to scrounge and then knocks the candleholder, leading to a devastating fire in the temple. The three monks finally unite together and make a concerted effort to put out the fire. Since then they understand the old saying "unity is strength" and begin to live a harmonious life. The temple never lacks water again.


ANALYSIS



At one point of time the movie shows that two people are 

trying to carry a single bucket, hanging from the bar held on 

their shoulders. Each one tries to push it towards the other 

in order to carry less weight. This is a common scene in 

most of the organisations today where the employees want 

to shift their responsibility to other fellow employees.


When asked in class about the solution to the problem of 
sharing load, a lot of them came up with different solutions.. 
The solution was quite simple - measure the centre using a scale. It can be related to an organisation too. There is always a simple solution. The only problem is discovering it .


Next, we noticed in the video , how the process of bringing 

the water uphill is changed when the second monk arrives. 

The single monk was carrying water everyday, but when the 

second monk arrived, they both started sharing the load. 

They updated the process so that all resources are optimally 

utilized – TEAM WORK .



But ….. the team work was short lived… They started 

transferring their load to each other. This shows the violation 

of the team work principle.
 






When the third monk comes, the quarrel become even more 

intense. No one was willing to bring water and was ordering 

the other person to do it. Infact, once when the 3rd monk got 

water, after climbing the top, he himself consumed it. This 

shows selfishness in an organisation.



At night when they sleep, we see that the the monastery catches fire. There was no water in the monastery at that time. When this happens, all the monks forget their hostility and try to put out the fire. The dilemma of who will carry the water was quickly forgotten and a system arose out of the initial chaos. They all put out the fire quickly .

Moral :
Many a times crisis situations are encountered where any kind of system is in place. Infact one should be ready for it and should not keep anything for tomorrow and do their work today itself. In the end we see that the monks resolve the situation by fixing a pulley and dividing their roles - hooking the bucket, roping it in and transporting to the monastery.