Three Monks is a Chinese animated film directed by A Da and produced my Shanghai Animation Film Studio. The 18 minute short film is without any dialogues is released in 1980. Since then it has been critically acclaimed and recieved many awards. Lets take a look at the video now.
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."
It can be understood that all the three monks are good at heart from their introductions. But still they were not able to achieve a harmony initially, Why?? This is where the role of management comes in.
All human beings most basic tendency is to get everything done without any effort, i.e. be lazy. If you can manage to get your work done by someone else you will be most happy. Mostly, prey to this will be the junior most member in the group. This is what has happened with the monks too. I am sure that it might have happened to most of us.
This is where the role of a manager comes in. He has to increase the total efficiency of the system.
Efficiency= Total Output/Total Input
Initially the only person was there and he used to fetch the water himself. When the second person came, they shared the load. With the addition of the third, no one is ready to fetch the water. Thus efficiency of the system has come down to zero or the system ceased to operate. It is the responsibility of the manager to divide the work efficiently and effectively among the team and to ensure that it is done.
Here in the case of fire, the three monks joined to put out the fire. They did the work effectively but not efficiently. They doused the fire. With only one man, there is only one way to carry the water. With the second they measured the stick carrying bucket and hanged the bucket exactly at the centre of the stick. Now the weight of the buck is shared equally by them. With third one, they put a rope and pulley system to bring the water up. Thus managers have to be innovative also.They need to make drastic changes depending on the changes in the system.
They continuously improved the system with the addition of the resources and finally reached a set up where maximum efficiency is achieved. Thus continuous improvement is also a key to success.
Last but not the least is the team work. As the number of men increase, output decreased i.e. number of buckets of water brought decreased. This happened because of lack of co-operation. When they started to work together as a team, their output increased.
Thus small clip has shown us the importance of the role of a manager, continuous improvement in the system and team work.
Valley crossing experiment was one of the best examples of learning management lessons through simple but thought provoking way. How many lessons can you learn from like the one given below??
If you look more closely you can learn a lot of things from this experiment. The most important lesson from this is the importance of team work. Just working in the same office under the same head did not mean team work. Every member of the team should share risk, responsibilities and should be a part of decision making. Then only it can be called team work.
In this experiment, it starts with analysing the number of members in the team and choosing the team. If the width of valley is more than two foot steps, the team should have more than three members. If the width is less than 1 foot step, each one can cross the valley independently without the help of the other. Thus the number of members of the team was to be identified. The person at the centre is always carrying more weight since he is acting as the fulcrum when the other two are crossing. That is the roles and responsibilities should be assigned based on the capabilities of the persons.
This is classic example of flat organizational structure in which no one is the boss of the other and thre responsibility of all are same. The guy at the front, at the middle and at the back have same role in the decision making. They all have to do self analysis among and who should agree on the who should play which role based upon their strengths and weaknesses.
An important aspect of this learning is the risk sharing and trust. All of them had one point or other had to completely depend on other members. This something which happens in everyone's case. We as human beings has to trust others. As you all know it is very difficult to build trust, but can a be destroyed in a moment. In this particular at first guy at the friend is completely depending on the other two to safely cross the valley. The and last person shares the weight of the second person to cross the valley and similarly the last one. Trust and risk are opposite ends. If there is complete trust on other team members, you need not worry about the risk. If the trust is less, risk is more.
Another important aspect of team work which we are learning is communication and coordination. The action of the three in the above coordinated. Otherwise there are chances that only of them of not acting according to the plan and risking others too.Therefore before doing any combined activity, the exact action plan with even the minute details has to made and the roles and responsibilities of each should be clearly defined. These should be clearly communicated to each member of the team. Any flaw in communication can lead to failure.It also be clear and precise. Otherwise it will be like the cartoon below.
I would also like to share you a video which communicates a message which is relevant in these days of rising CO2 emissions and high fuel prices. It also depicts the importance of team work.
Khan Academy is a non profit educational organization created in 2006 by Salman Khan, a triple graduate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a BS in mathematics, a BS in
electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical
engineering and computer science), he pursued an MBA from Harvard Business School. The plight which Salman Khan choose was rather unusual and a daring one.
Salman Khan
After graduating from Harvard Businees School, he began his career as a hedge fund analyst at Boston. He was requested to help his cousin Nadia on mathematics who was staying in New Orleans. He began to give her lessons remotely using Yahoo's Doodle Notepad. But later because of the difficulty in finding a free time for both of them, he uploaded YouTube videos of lectures.What happened was his cousin actually preferred YouTube Videos over live sessions. He also noticed a large number of people are viewing his videos in YouTube. Hits increased tremendously and he started to get encouraging mails and comments.
He thought of what can be reason for so large popularity for his videos. In the case of YouTube videos, viewer can actually pause the video, repeat the video and even view it at later time to refresh. The speciality of the videos was that, it avoided the standard format of person solving on a blackboard. Instead videos were like a person solving a problem on a piece of paper thinking loudly. As days passed, the popularity of his videos increased. He began to put Youtube lectures on a large number of topics mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics and microeconomics, and computer science. Now there are more than 3200 videos available on his YouTube channel on various Topics.
He tried to analyze the reason for the popularity of the videos. Different students have different pace of learning. Some may be quick to understand a concept while they may take a longer time to understand a similar concept. This varies from student to student also. Therefore one of the major draw back of class room education is that all the students are taught at the same pace. Some may understand what is taught while some others may not. There is also a limitation on the time a teacher can spent on teaching one particular kid. So those kids, who didn't understand the concept are left behind. This fundamental issue can be solved using video lectures. Students can pause the lecture to understand a topic, repeat the same again and again, can do the studies at a time he finds suitable at any place which he finds comfortable. There no one is actually left behind. If some one needs more time on a particular topic, he can spent as much as time he require. The student is also saved from the embarrassment of asking publicly his doubt.
It is this understanding which made Salman Khan to set up Khan Academy. He quit his job as a hedge fund analyst in 2009 and devoted all this time for Khan Academy. The mission of Khan Academy is
"Providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere"
After the introduction revolutionary YouTube lectures, he thought of taking Khan Academy to the next level. Khan Academy is current offering different interactive sessions for students through the website www.khanacademy.org.The were given self assessment tests where the difficulty of the test varies according to the proficiency of students in the subject. The main philosophy behind course formulation is increase the interaction between students and teachers & between students. To achieve this, Khan Academy actually wants students to do the learning at their home at their convenience and the problems or exercises will be done in class rooms where teachers will be actually able to spent quality time with students. It also encourages those doing well to help struggling class mates. This Khan Academy method of teaching is implemented in a few schools and is proved to be extremely good; improving overall performance of the class and there is no below average students after implementation of this program. This can be considered as an extra ordinary achievement. There are provisions in the website to track how much time does a student has spent in understanding a particular concept, how many problems has he completed etc and all this data can be accessed by the students teacher. This also lets a teacher to know the problematic area for a particular kid, there by giving more personnel attention.
Khan academy works with a vision is to create "the world's first free, world-class virtual school where anyone can learn anything."
After quitting his job he found it difficult to fund for the entire program. Due to the popularity of his videos, he got some donations in the range of $1000 to $10000 from various places. Khan Academy website also earned $2000 dollars per month from advertisements in its website till 2010, when it stopped taking advertisements. Khan academy has significant backing from Bill Gates Foundation. It also has received a $2million from Google to create videos on more topics and to translate the core library into worlds most widely spoken languages.
Working with such a small capital and its a non profit institution, Mr. Khan thought it would be difficult to attract good talents for addition of lectures on topics and development & maintenance of website. To his astonishment there were a few talented people, who are ready to join his institution. They are ready to work for an average upper middle class salary. What they seek from this is the satisfaction they are deriving from working for a social cause like this. He found all the people in his team are self motivated and they need little further motivation (Theory Y). Working with a small team on a very small capital, Khan is set to change the world educational scenario.
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