LE 06 - Three Monks No water

Three Monks is a Chinese animated feature film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio.

Background :

The film is based on the ancient 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 film does not contain any dialogues, allowing it to be watched by any culture, and a different music instrument was used to signify each monk.

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.

Learnings:

Three Monks, No Water is based on the ancient 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 proverb is close in meaning to the saying "Let George do it," correctly noting how individuals shirk group responsibilities.
This story teaches a gentle, humorous lesson about Responsibility . Though this story was primarily made keeping in mind young children, it can be of great lesson to modern entreprenuers as well as business institutions. It iterates the fact that the responsibilities in any institutions must be divided clearly and the system should be developed such that any reluctance on any individual must be recognised quickly.

 It also aptly shows how responsibility can be realized by people in case of emergencies. But the lesson is to understand the value of unity before any calamity.

LE 04 - Valley Crossing - Key Learnings

"United we stand, Divided we fall" . The value of teamwork has been shown umpteen numbers of time in history. It has enabled man to come out of cages and reach the moon. What a single man cannot achieve individually can be easily achieved working as a team and that to with manifold increase in scale.

Explanation of valley crossing through this picture:

Learnings from this exercise:

Advantages and disadvantages of teamwork

Advantages

• ·         Teamwork can lead to better decisions, products, or services. The quality of teamwork may be measured by analyzing the following six components of collaboration among team members: communication, coordination, balance of member contributions, mutual support, effort, and cohesion. In one study, teamwork quality as measured in this manner correlated with team performance in the areas of effectiveness (i.e., producing high quality work) and efficiency (i.e., meeting schedules and budgets). A 2008 meta-analysis also found a relationship between teamwork and team effectiveness.
• ·         Team members’ ratings of their satisfaction with a team is correlated with the level of teamwork processes present.
• ·         In healthcare, teamwork is associated with increased patient safety.

Disadvantages

• ·         Teamwork may have an "unintended effect of fermenting hostility toward the managerial goal of making the teams fully self-managing." In one case study of a clothing manufacturer, a switch from production line work (with bonuses given for individual performance) to teamwork (in which an individual's earnings depended on team performance) caused workers to resent having to monitor each other. 
• ·         There is a potential of "social loafing" (i.e., an individual's doing less work in a team than what he/she would normally do working individually). In order to minimize social loafing, management can make individual performance more visible while in a team setting. This can be done by forming smaller teams, specializing specific tasks to certain individuals, and measuring individual performance. Social loafing can also be reduced by increasing employee motivation, by selecting employees who have previously shown themselves to be motivated, and increasing job enrichment. In experiments conducted in the 1990s, an increase in group cohesiveness appeared to decrease social loafing.

These are some of the learnings from this exercise.

LE 03 - Success of Khan Academy:Management Lesson Learnt

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