Management Lessons learnt from Three Monks...

Let us first see an award winning Chinese animated feature film "Three Monks"and then discuss the management lessons learnt from it.

Let us first discuss the Technical Lessons learnt from this film:

Effort: When only one monk lived in the monastery, the effort to fill the buckets of water and bring them back to the monastery was more than the individual effort required to fetch water when two monks were living. When more and more people are added in an organization, the amount of effort per person must reduce and the synergy of all individual efforts must produce the desired results.

Active Participation: There is one incident where the two monks measure the length of the stick to hang the barrel, center is measured by one while marking is done by the other. This shows that there is active participation from both the monks to get the work done. A management should strive for such participation because improves productivity, efficiency and also acts as a motivator.

Process Improvement: The first monk, second monk and in the end all the three monks together used different processes to satisfy their needs of water. Every method proved successful. But the same method might not be effective in a different case. What a management needs to learn that different tasks need different processes or the same process to be improved over time, if necessary replaced. The primary purpose is to get the task done using the most economical and productive process.

Attribute	1 Monk	2 Monks	3 Monks
Effort	Maximum	Less than 1 monk	Minimum
Productivity	Minimum	More than 1 monk	Maximum
Output	2 buckets at a time	1 bucket at a time	1 bucket at a time

Let us now discuss the Lessons on Human Behavior learnt from this film:

Team Wok: The importance of working as a team can clearly be learnt from the movie. It was only co-operation and team work that finally helped in saving their monastery.

Change in Behavior: The monks were initially very generous and polite towards each other but as time passed the differences began to surface. The lesson to be learnt here is that no matter how many differences one has with the other person in the team, one should put them aside as work together as a team to achieve desired results.

Hidden Lessons: 

• The film uses no language, but still effectively communicates so many important lessons. This teaches us how trivial a role language plays in communication. Effective communication needs good listeners, strong content and any simple method to convey the content fully.
• It is very necessary to stay calm and composed in times of crisis. The behavior of monks during the time of fire is a lesson in it itself.

I believe there are many other cues we can learn from in this video. I’ll definitely look for them. I’d like you also to look for them. I’d be happy to have your comments and views on this.