Three Monks: A tale of management lessons.

Three Monks (Chinese: 三个和尚, San ge he shang) is a Chinese animated feature film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. After the cultural revolution and the fall of the political Gang of Four in 1976, the film was one of the first animations created as part of the rebirth period. It is also referred to as The Three Buddhist Priests.There is an old 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" and the movie clearly depicts this theme . Th e story is set in a far away monastery where one monk come and start praying he is responsible for himself so he fetch water at regular time after some time another monk come and start living in the same monastery, they both have a fight regarding who will now fetch the water , after some time a third monk come an the previous two monks tell him to fetch the water for them too. Ultimately no one agrees to fetch water one night fire broke out in the temple and they now have no water with them so after seeing the condition of monastery they coordinate and run for their life by forming a team to fetch the water from the nearby lake.


Some management lessons from the movie are :

1. Synergy of the whole team taken together is always greater than sum of the individual persons taken together.

2.The best solution to a problem only evolves with passage of time.

3.Teamwork always enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of any task.

4. Work distribution and work segregation always leads to increase in the effectiveness of the process.

5.Everyone's contribution is very important in the roper functioning of the organisation.

6.Feedback is an important aspect of organizational hierarchy.

7.Conflicts and Quarrels are part and parcel of organisation working.

We can find many examples from our day to day life which  are in sync with the lessons from the video "Three Monks". for eg During our college days when we were organizing technical fest of our college we were a group of 15 students had different ideas and outlooks but we were not working as a team rather we were just a group of 15 persons but during the next year when we introspected ourselves and found our faults we were able to organize the fest in a grand way.

Keep checking this blog for more management lessons.