Management Lesson from 3 Monks     

3 Monks' Story - Part 1

                               

3 Monks' Story - Part 2

Story of 3 Monks

A young monk while travelling reached a monastery on a hill and he started living there. Every day he would fetch 2 buckets of water from a cold stream downhill. Rain or shine, he would never miss a day lugging this burden up the mountain to the temple.

One day another travelling monk came to stay with him .Young monk gave him water to drink and they both did their daily chores and slept. Next morning, when 2nd monk was going to get water from downhill, the young monk ridiculed him thinking that he is extricated from his daily duty of bringing water. But second monk noticed and asked him to come along with him. Since they would share the water, they descended the mountain together to fetch it. Due to the difference in their heights, the men were unable to balance the shared load on their carrying rod without sloshing the contents of the two buckets all over the short monk. So, now they both were not co-ordinating properly. And on the way back they both stopped due to differences of opinion on how to carry the water. They both tried to find out a solution to the problem in their own ways, but nothing substantial came out. Finally, they both used a ruler to measure the rod on which bucket was loaded. And they found a solution to take water uphill together marking the parts on the rod that each will carry. But They managed to retrieve only a fraction of the water (only one bucket), the young monk would have carried on his own, and not enough to store in the water tank. 

Just as the monks began to see each other as ungrateful and unreasonable, a third monk arrived. He also drank water and his arrival prompted everyone to expect that someone else would take on the chore. Consequently, no one fetched water though everybody was thirsty. At night, a rat came to scrounge and then knocked the candleholder, leading to a devastating fire in the temple.

Then, the three monks finally united together and made a concerted effort to put out the fire. They all went to get water. They divided the task, co-ordinated and helped each other. They did commendable Team work and finally got successful in dousing the fire.

And then they understood the old saying "unity is strength" and the importance of co-ordination. And since then, they used a Physical pulley on the hill to fetch water from downhill, so that only one monk would go down, other would pull water bucket up using pulley, and 3rd would take water from pulley to fill the water tank. At last, they began to live a harmonious life. And the temple never lacked water again.

In this story we have seen 3 different ways of doing the same task - bringing water uphill in the monastery from the water stream that is down the hill.

1^st Method

Only one monk was doing the work. He never missed to fetch water from downhill. He was not dependent on anyone and was able to work with much concerted effort because there was no one whom he could rely on or share his work with.

2nd Method

Since 2 monks would share the water, they together had to do the work. But younger monk tried to extricate himself, putting the whole work on other monk's shoulders. So, there was a tendency of running away from responsibility. And this is what happens in a real team in the real world scenario.. But a team wins only when it tries to reach an optimized solution considering opinions of all. So, there has to be co-ordination. This optimized solution comes with a standardized technique as in the case of 2 monks, they used purely objective way of measurement using a ruler.

And in the real world, here comes up the responsibility of a manager to divide the task among his team in such a way that no one would try to shun his/her part of duty. A manager thus uses a standardized way to divide the task considering everyone’s capability and skills. The differences of opinions also arose and that is bound to happen when more people are involved.

3rd Method

When a rat came, knocked the candleholder, leading to a devastating fire in the temple, then the three monks finally united together and made a concerted effort to put out the fire. They all went to get water. They divided the task, co-ordinated and helped each other. They did commendable Team work and finally got successful in dousing the fire. This was the best way as they all focussed on a central goal of dousing the fire. They all gave their cent percent without escaping from the responsibility. They divided the task efficiently - one would fill the water from the stream and take it to the midway, from where other monk would fetch bucket from him and take it to third monk near temple, and third monk would put the water on the fire to douse it. This proper planning led to accomplishment of the goal in a much easier and faster way. That is why now they devised a new scientific method of pulley to use for fetching water.

So,

In the 1st method, the productivity of a single person was maximum as there was no one to intervene.

In 2nd method, the productivity could have been maximum, but they both relinquished their responsibilities so, they could not do better. Had they both understood the importance of the team work, co-ordination and proper planning, then they would have done extremely good job.

In the 3rd method, they all focussed on a common goal, did great team work, coordinated well, and finally achieved their target. And thereafter to improve their process, they started using a pulley system to fetch water. This also shows that a team, if properly coordinated, continuously improves the efficiency of the working methodology by adoption of more innovative methods and makes the work culture more harmonious and congenial.

                   Valley Crossing - A management Problem 

Question: Three people want to cross a valley which is more than 1 step wide.So how will they all cross the valley?

Answer:  When the leading person crosses the edge of the path, he starts hanging in the air. But he can't fall unless the other two give up or he leaves the hold of the bar. And as the 2nd person reaches the verge of the path ,the first person reaches the other end.Now Second person hangs in the air holding the long bar.

Similarly, as soon as the third person reaches the edge, the second person reaches the other end.
And finally all three cross the valley.

So , how does this exercise relate to a manager?

Just as the co-ordination among the team members was made in the exercise , in the similar fashion , the coordination among the employees in an organization is required. And that relies in the hands of the manager.

The management principles which I found in this activity are:

Team work : 

To succeed at the task in hand, everyone involved needs to combine their efforts. If everyone does their job well, then it increases what the team can accomplish. This teamwork has to be recognised by everyone and know that great things can happen if individuals master the fundamentals and work together as one unit. Everyone has their own unique role, but each person's individual role must be recognised and appreciated.

" Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success. ”

When challenges arise (as they always do), the team needs to have the resources, accountability and commitment to deal with them in a constructive and positive manner. A sense of teamwork will play an integral part in this.

Individually humans are weak, Together they are taller, Provided they are managed properly.

                                                    T - Together
                                        E - Everyone
                                        A - Achieves
                                        M - More

Leadership:

In the exercise, each member has the same set of tasks, burdens and responsibilities. But , not every member in the team would take the initiative to go first as the first person is the first risk taker and not everyone in the team would be willing to follow anyone else. Yet, the show has to run and the team has to do its job and this is where a manager comes in.

The Manager is responsible for taking the initiative because he visualizes the goal in his mind. The manager is responsible for the work division, for giving the interdependent roles to the team workers and finally take them all along to achieve the target.

Work Division and Interdependence:

Now, it would not be practical if each role in an organization can be crafted as in the above case with similar risks borne by everyone and expect everyone else to follow the leader thereby satisfying every employee.

Well, we certainly cannot have an organization designed to satisfy every employee. It is the role of the manager to divide the work in an effective manner keeping in mind the accomplishment of his SMART goal.

Remember ,

                    ||   We never create the organization as per the capability of the employees.

                               We just design the organization and adjust people into it.    ||

The responsibilities of a manager are:-

1. Work Planning:

How to organize work and people in terms of specializing people in specific work or distributing a common chunk of work among all?

2. Authority Planning:

How to organize power or authority in terms of decentralizing into departments, each responsible for their own performance and decisions, or centralizing decision making across the organization?

3. Planning  - Control:

How to regulate work? By a set of hard enforced rules or a set of norms “supposed” to be followed?

For performing the tasks in the most effective way ,the manager must be well versed with these tools. The manager also has to be equipped with these skills to understand his responsibility at each stage:

In the diagram shown , the skills have been divided into three levels. That depicts the range of skills required by a manager in each role. That is something which I have personally felt during my job with my ex-employer:
1.In a lower level management , technical skills or the domain knowledge and human resource management is of utmost importance followed by Conceptual skills.

2.In a middle level management , most important aspect is of human resource management, followed by conceptual and technical skills because here strategies are made using conceptual skills and maximum human resource management is done.

3. In a higher level management , most important part of the job comes out to be strategy conceptualization and work force management. So , it is the conceptual and human skills that dominate here , with a very attention to the technical aspect of the things.


This can be related to any real world company, and this is why a starting level manager with technical and human skills take some time to reach to the higher level management as the conceptual skills are learnt by experience.

Khan Academy - Evolution of The 21st Century Education System

Flying a kite without a string 

Everyone does things in simple ways but quite a few who are different do things differently. They are the ones who have a dream and they dare to realize it. Almost everything in the modern world which we are all using is directly or indirectly gifted by the ideas of these great different thinkers whom we call as innovators.
They fly the kite of their dreams in their mind without the strings and work hard to make their dream come true so that one day they can fly their dream's kite with the string of the ways they found for reaching the target.

And modern day's innovators are not in any way less than the Entrepreneurs. And one of them who visualized to revolutionize the present education system with the incorporation of Technology to humanize the classrooms, is Salman Khan. Khan, an MIT graduate, had a dream of making "A Global One World Classroom" so as to facilitate peer to peer learning, increasing the participative learning, breaking the age barrier and bringing everyone at a common platform i.e. a global classroom for real time free learning.

He started implementation of his idea as a non profit organization-  Khan Academy , for which he left his job of the Hedge Fund Analyst. He set his goal ,visualize it in the mind , and started working for it with full dedication. Now with the mission of imparting free and always accessible education to millions of students through this platform, he is working hard with his team.

Khan Academy started with a very simple thought, when Salman Khan saw his cousin needing some help in mathematics, he started tutoring her using yahoo notepad. When other friends sought similar help, he decided it would be more practical to distribute the tutorials on Youtube. This started the revelation we now know as khan academy. The popularity of the videos and the testimonials of appreciative students prompted Khan to quit his job in finance as a hedge fund analyst at Connective Capital Management in 2009, and completely focus on the tutorials.

Now Khan academy is having different projects in different geographic locations and are constantly trying to impart education in a more efficient way of using their online truely personalized adaptive tool. They are growing and are acheiving their goals with the help of Technology implementation. They have in a way flipped the whole of the education system where now lectures happen at home and homework at schools under the complete supervision of teacher. Using this tool , different students in the same class do different things at their own pace and teacher administers all of them at the same time. This is how Salman Khan is making the string of his endeavors to make the kite of his dreams fly.

Today Khan Academy is seen by 4 million different users per month to access different videos. And they are still counting.