The story of 3 monks.

In our last lecture, we watched a video. The video was based on 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 video...

A young monk lives a simple life in a temple on top of a hill. His daily task was to haul 2 buckets of water up the hill. One day another monk joins him. He tries to share the job with another monk, but the carry pole is only long enough for one bucket. So they both share the load. Then comes the third monk. It prompts everyone to expect that someone else will take on the chore. Third monk drinks all the water. Consequently, no one fetches water though everybody is thirsty. At night, a rat comes to scrounge. The rat then knocks the candleholder. It leads 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 device a method which leads to equal load sharing between the three of them and they begin to live a harmonious life. The temple never lacks water again.


Important learning from the video : 


1. Productivity :
We can see that at start, the first monk was carrying 2 buckets of water. When second monk joins him, we are expecting that the productivity will increase because there are 4 working hands. But, in contrast, it does not happen. They both carry 2 buckets of water. This is because of the no of sticks available i.e. 1. And finally when 3rd monk joins the team, they share the work of carrying buckets. But is the productivity really increasing?? No. They are still carrying 2 buckets of water only. Each monk is not getting utilized 100%. 



It teaches us that productivity on the part of employees is important because getting your job done will help the company's growth. If the company grows and progresses, profits will increase. If profits in the company increase, not only will the bosses be happier but they will hire more people and give raises to those doing a good job and increase benefits for them. If employees are share holders in the company they will win even more benefits since their shares will be worth more and they will have a nice nest egg when they retire. 
Productivity is good for everyone and important for a company's survival.


2. Innovation :
As they say, necessity is the mother of innovation. The story also depicts how a crisis situation can be beneficial for the organization. As the number of monks increased from 1 to 3, all of them were trying to pass on the job. But no one was 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 development.


3. Co operation : 
Co operation is defined as "working or acting together for a common purpose or benefit." In sociological terms cooperation is important because it increases the productivity of workers in the production. As we can see in the video, first of all 2 monks were not at all ready to co operate with each other for their task. When 3rd monk joined them, nobody co operated. But incident of fire on the monastery taught them to think about the situation and come with the solution. To achieve something if you are part of a team, of any kind
we need to cooperate so that we achieve what we are trying to do. If we don't talk to each other (one message doesn't go where it's intended, for example), and you want to tell someone something, it doesn,'t get done, does it? If people do do what they say they will do then it gets done. If someone expects you to do something and you don't, it could result in confusions in other people's minds, possibly, I don't know if you have observed this or not of course, but have a look and see if it makes sense to you.